Poetry Collections by Kyle Dargan
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PANZER HERZ: A Live Dissection by Kyle G. Dargan
A poet’s barbed final collection that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity
The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity. Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.
CRITICAL RESPONSE
"Panzerherz is an armored heart, a medical term to describe a dense calcification, "armored” in the manner of a military vehicle. Metaphorically rich, Dargan opens his book with conflicting quotes about masculinity by Theodore Roosevelt, André 3000, Michel Foucault, Prodigy, and Doctur Dot. So before readers even get to the first incredible poem, we know we are in for a complex ride. Vulnerable and analyzing—the armor is carefully taken away as each poem builds on the next—this book eloquently works to confront racism and capitalism and its effects on the male body and psyche."
Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry Blog
"The subtitle of Kyle Dargan's sixth collection, Panzer Herz, is a bone-chilling advertisement: A Live Dissection. The specimen struggling through that dissection is masculinity, and specifically masculinity’s most conspicuous, least anatomized subspecies: heterosexual, cisgendered, its emotions shielded within a “Panzer Herz”—a German compound meaning “armored heart” or “tank heart.” Panzer Herz conducts a retrospective tour through a lifetime of masculine models: fathers, TV gunslingers, anime swordsmen, larger-than-life Black icons like Biggie and Magic Johnson. It’s also a quest across English for the right terminology for masculinity[.]"
Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation / Harriet Books
PANZER HERZ: A Live Dissection by Kyle G. Dargan
A poet’s barbed final collection that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity
The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity. Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies.
CRITICAL RESPONSE
"Panzerherz is an armored heart, a medical term to describe a dense calcification, "armored” in the manner of a military vehicle. Metaphorically rich, Dargan opens his book with conflicting quotes about masculinity by Theodore Roosevelt, André 3000, Michel Foucault, Prodigy, and Doctur Dot. So before readers even get to the first incredible poem, we know we are in for a complex ride. Vulnerable and analyzing—the armor is carefully taken away as each poem builds on the next—this book eloquently works to confront racism and capitalism and its effects on the male body and psyche."
Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry Blog
"The subtitle of Kyle Dargan's sixth collection, Panzer Herz, is a bone-chilling advertisement: A Live Dissection. The specimen struggling through that dissection is masculinity, and specifically masculinity’s most conspicuous, least anatomized subspecies: heterosexual, cisgendered, its emotions shielded within a “Panzer Herz”—a German compound meaning “armored heart” or “tank heart.” Panzer Herz conducts a retrospective tour through a lifetime of masculine models: fathers, TV gunslingers, anime swordsmen, larger-than-life Black icons like Biggie and Magic Johnson. It’s also a quest across English for the right terminology for masculinity[.]"
Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation / Harriet Books
Winner of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry
"In Anagnorisis: Poems, the award-winning poet Kyle Dargan ignites a reckoning."
[ Read author blog on the development of Anagnorisis ]
Cover artwork by Nate Lewis
CRITICAL RESPONSE
"Dargan’s fifth collection takes its title from the literary term for a moment of sudden recognition. Here, it amounts almost to resignation — about the country’s racist brutality [...]."
Book Review, New York Times
"One takeaway from this marvelous, unsettling, illuminating book is Dargan’s statement in 'Separating' that 'I understand so much of blackness // as what I do in spite of my caging.' Identity, for Dargan, is finally more a matter of acts rather than of words."
Lisa Russ Spaar, Virginia Quarterly Review
"Dargan is a master of threnody: lines tensed and pulled so much that his poems shake the page. He’s writing within an American language that is broken […]. Anagnorisis is a book of the inevitable[.]"
Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"There’s a six-page masterwork entitled 'In 2016, the African-American poet Kyle Dargan is asked to consider writing more like the African-American poet Ross Gay.' This referendum on “joy” is insightful and eye-opening[.]"
Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Kyle Dargan has a wonderful ability to distill moments and show us their wider implications in tight, controlled, strongly crafted lines. I’m excited to share this book with our members."
Brain K. Spears, The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
"The collection has many poems that illume my imagination in ways I cannot fully explain, but I am going to try. One such poem is “In 2016, the African-American Poet Kyle Dargan is Asked to Consider Writing More Like the African-American Poet Ross Gay”. I don’t think I’m being over the top when I say this poem demands to be read by creative writing students and teachers worldwide [...]. I can assure you that Dargan succeeds in his desire to be humanly whole with this poem and with this book. It’s a book of our time and for all time. Read it."
Stephen Furlong, LitStyle
"It is difficult to read this collection of poetry without noticing its many contradictions, which serve to shine a light on the contradictions that persist in the current environment. Many of us claim that we do not discriminate, while at the same time enjoying our lives of privilege without realizing it. One of the core questions the speaker of these poems confronts is whether he wants to be seen or to stay hidden. Put another way, should the speaker resist and question what has become the norm or should he accept the norm and stay hidden, which, perhaps, is safer."
Susan Mockler, The Florida Review
"Anagnorisis bridges cultures and challenges identities. The poems explore landscapes and take risks. Dargan intentionally provokes mixed reactions with the collection’s political content, content which is satirical, profound, and exact. And all readers will admire Dargan’s ability to challenge differing points of view, via careful use of images, which is paramount to strong poetry."
Andrew Jarvis, New York Journal of Books
ADVANCE PRAISE
The poems in Anagnorisis are weightlifting; repeatedly pushing the burden of current events—the gentrification of DC, the numberless black deaths at the hands of authority, US/Global relations, our rapidly altering ecosystem— away from chest, trying to hold them at a distance, only to pull them back and attempt to master the muscle required to survive and write and celebrate in times like these. “Rage would be a word to fit in the mouth/ had the mouth not grown small from watching” Dargan writes, and does the work of gracefully making room in his poems to get eye-to-eye with a people’s mammoth rage, and also remind us of the daily, small, and enduring hopes we must have for a better nation and world.
~Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X
In Dargan's Anagnorisis , what can be called 'disillusionment' is life torquing into complication and deeper possibilities. Here, communities in the micro and macro mangle and contort the speaker out of his focus on systems of oppression and onto oppressed people, decimating all distractions for charismatic calls for joy—'Yes, I am thankful, / but I cannot accommodate you / inside my gratitude,'—such that the speaker can, with wisdom, 'know how a song / do & don't tell.' Dargan leaves no social upheaval untouched. Ecopoetic, internationally erudite, and chiseled by love, these poems 'know the phenomenon that is judgment,' making a torch song into a brilliant resurrection.
~Phillip B. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior
Anagnorisis is a book of riveting intimacy and of national significance; a reckoning with this terrifying immediate moment: Trump-times and macho disasters. Yet it is also a book of unsentimental and profound hope in flesh and blood everyday-living people. It is a book of “Dee Cee” and a book of America. Dargan’s words are restrained, matter of fact and yet spell-binding. The landscape, the sound and the rhythm are gorgeous and true. His stories are throat catching. Anagnorisis will endure. Dargan is at once our poet and our poetics.
~Dr. Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
Longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry
"In Anagnorisis: Poems, the award-winning poet Kyle Dargan ignites a reckoning."
[ Read author blog on the development of Anagnorisis ]
Cover artwork by Nate Lewis
CRITICAL RESPONSE
"Dargan’s fifth collection takes its title from the literary term for a moment of sudden recognition. Here, it amounts almost to resignation — about the country’s racist brutality [...]."
Book Review, New York Times
"One takeaway from this marvelous, unsettling, illuminating book is Dargan’s statement in 'Separating' that 'I understand so much of blackness // as what I do in spite of my caging.' Identity, for Dargan, is finally more a matter of acts rather than of words."
Lisa Russ Spaar, Virginia Quarterly Review
"Dargan is a master of threnody: lines tensed and pulled so much that his poems shake the page. He’s writing within an American language that is broken […]. Anagnorisis is a book of the inevitable[.]"
Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"There’s a six-page masterwork entitled 'In 2016, the African-American poet Kyle Dargan is asked to consider writing more like the African-American poet Ross Gay.' This referendum on “joy” is insightful and eye-opening[.]"
Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Kyle Dargan has a wonderful ability to distill moments and show us their wider implications in tight, controlled, strongly crafted lines. I’m excited to share this book with our members."
Brain K. Spears, The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
"The collection has many poems that illume my imagination in ways I cannot fully explain, but I am going to try. One such poem is “In 2016, the African-American Poet Kyle Dargan is Asked to Consider Writing More Like the African-American Poet Ross Gay”. I don’t think I’m being over the top when I say this poem demands to be read by creative writing students and teachers worldwide [...]. I can assure you that Dargan succeeds in his desire to be humanly whole with this poem and with this book. It’s a book of our time and for all time. Read it."
Stephen Furlong, LitStyle
"It is difficult to read this collection of poetry without noticing its many contradictions, which serve to shine a light on the contradictions that persist in the current environment. Many of us claim that we do not discriminate, while at the same time enjoying our lives of privilege without realizing it. One of the core questions the speaker of these poems confronts is whether he wants to be seen or to stay hidden. Put another way, should the speaker resist and question what has become the norm or should he accept the norm and stay hidden, which, perhaps, is safer."
Susan Mockler, The Florida Review
"Anagnorisis bridges cultures and challenges identities. The poems explore landscapes and take risks. Dargan intentionally provokes mixed reactions with the collection’s political content, content which is satirical, profound, and exact. And all readers will admire Dargan’s ability to challenge differing points of view, via careful use of images, which is paramount to strong poetry."
Andrew Jarvis, New York Journal of Books
ADVANCE PRAISE
The poems in Anagnorisis are weightlifting; repeatedly pushing the burden of current events—the gentrification of DC, the numberless black deaths at the hands of authority, US/Global relations, our rapidly altering ecosystem— away from chest, trying to hold them at a distance, only to pull them back and attempt to master the muscle required to survive and write and celebrate in times like these. “Rage would be a word to fit in the mouth/ had the mouth not grown small from watching” Dargan writes, and does the work of gracefully making room in his poems to get eye-to-eye with a people’s mammoth rage, and also remind us of the daily, small, and enduring hopes we must have for a better nation and world.
~Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X
In Dargan's Anagnorisis , what can be called 'disillusionment' is life torquing into complication and deeper possibilities. Here, communities in the micro and macro mangle and contort the speaker out of his focus on systems of oppression and onto oppressed people, decimating all distractions for charismatic calls for joy—'Yes, I am thankful, / but I cannot accommodate you / inside my gratitude,'—such that the speaker can, with wisdom, 'know how a song / do & don't tell.' Dargan leaves no social upheaval untouched. Ecopoetic, internationally erudite, and chiseled by love, these poems 'know the phenomenon that is judgment,' making a torch song into a brilliant resurrection.
~Phillip B. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior
Anagnorisis is a book of riveting intimacy and of national significance; a reckoning with this terrifying immediate moment: Trump-times and macho disasters. Yet it is also a book of unsentimental and profound hope in flesh and blood everyday-living people. It is a book of “Dee Cee” and a book of America. Dargan’s words are restrained, matter of fact and yet spell-binding. The landscape, the sound and the rhythm are gorgeous and true. His stories are throat catching. Anagnorisis will endure. Dargan is at once our poet and our poetics.
~Dr. Imani Perry, Hughes-Rogers professor of African American studies at Princeton University and author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem and Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
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Finalist for the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Finalist for the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry
Honorable Mention, 2016 Eric Hoffer Award in Poetry
In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but self-portraits that capture what of these departed figures remains within him. Amid this processing of mortality, it becomes clear that he has arrived at a turning point as a writer and a man.
As the title suggests, Dargan aspires toward an unflinching honesty. These poems do not purport to possess life’s answers or seek to employ language to mask what they do not know. Dargan confesses as a means of reaching out to the nomadic human soul and inviting it to accompany him on a walk toward the unknown.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Politics & Prose - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
“Kyle Dargan is a fiercely unapologetic lyricist who reminds us--with every lean, unerring stanza--how much of our lives is eked out in shadow. In this taut, revelatory volume, he presents us with all the languages we need to confront that restless smolder in the light. These days, when every door that manages to open opens upon chaos, these poems--far from a surrender to solace--move our cluttered minds to our fists. There is nothing comfortable here, no hard-rendered morals or dog-eared ideals, no smirking structures or bleak platitudes. There is just the explosive power of a poet at the pinnacle.”
Judges' Citation, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards
"Honest Engine’s ultimate lesson is that home is the place of the necessary labors. And as the book that highlights a four-volume journey though the rough terrains of America, it’s a refreshingly prayerful and sympathetic view."
Rigoberto Gonzalez, Los Angeles Review of Books
"What does it mean to deceive? To be honest? To believe? To doubt? What does it mean to be a man? A son? A lover? A black man in America, or anywhere? The poems in Honest Engine step into the roil of these questions with a fierce intelligence matched by stores of humility and compassion, boldly exploring the 'point at which good is susceptible / to chaos’ seduction,' where frustration might tip into violence."
Lisa Russ Spaar, On the Seawall
"Dargan's language, though dense at times, allows enough porosity to invite the reader into the poems, and into the questions they posit about our understanding of masculinity and of what it means to be a black male in America [...]. This book should be required reading for anyone who might be curious about the accumulated struggles, confusions, fears, and triumphs that one man has the courage to lay bare."
Teri Cross Davis, Poet Lore
"These are poems of the critic, the perpetual outsider, the haunted man, the insomniac. These are poems that peer deeply and delve into the parts of ourselves we might not like, but know. The collection works because the speaker is not exempt from his own penetrating eye, and because, as much as he details his cynicism, he is a lover of all that’s human and flawed. The most honest engine we have is the heart, and in this book, Dargan offers his."
Laura Swearingen-Steadwell, The Rumpus
"The author’s note at the beginning of the collection, Dargan’s fourth, acknowledges the deaths of five people close to him within just a few years, experiences he says exceeded his previous 'thresholds of pain.' The ensuing poems look head-on at an end that stretches out beyond our imaginations, at the middle spaces between life, memory, and death. But they also address the pain of racial hatred and the pain that masculinity can confer when bravado goes unchecked."
Tanya Paperny, Washington City Paper
"Dargan must believe art can change people as he shows first what is good and then what disappointment can come from the lack of it. It’s a form of social action we can call the Textual Factor in intellectual leadership — or writing as a moral force. The poet knows what’s at stake and we get that in Dargan’s measured emotion, and his careful word. There are terrific lines in each poem, stirring from spiritual sources and sadness spawned from anger."
Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
"Dargan's book is exquisitely structured. The completeness of the conversations surrounding loss and pain is enviable, as is the richness of Dargan's world. Whether he is pulling from Gwendolyn Brooks, N.E.R.D., or the comic Watchmen, the poems remain relevant and grounded."
Michael VanCalbergh, The Collagist
"Dargan’s fourth poetry collection is an intervention involving ownership, not in the form of control, but in the form of self-acceptance. Through his relentless, enduring voice, we will ourselves to learn about taking ownership of one’s existence, especially when everything else is cosmically destined to crumble around us; and even if there aren’t any witnesses."
Hoffer Award Citation, US Review of Books
Selection of the VQR Poetry Series
Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mélange of voices—individuals passed on the street, journalists, philosophers, movie and cartoon characters, hip-hop emcees, and fellow poets—all of which build to a self-diagnosed logorrhea dementia. Dargan’s voice channels an America mentally fatigued from a decade of foreign conflict yet cautiously hopeful about the promise of the country’s renewed introspection.
In these poems, rife with the anxieties of the aughts, Dargan seeks to destabilize social and cultural landscapes believed to be settled—breaking and clearing ground to lay the foundation for a new American perspective.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
"Kyle Dargan’s third collection begins with something we rarely see in a volume of poetry these days — an honest-to-god manifesto entitled 'Breathing: A Preliminary.' In it Dargan concludes that he is 'tired of writing the poems I’m expected to write and whose language leads me to the places I’m expected to go.' As manifesto resolutions go, this sort of assertion is nothing new, but Logorrhea Dementia delivers upon its author’s promise, and often brilliantly so. Dargan’s first two collections are capable and shapely, but they don’t prepare us for the sustained imaginative ferocity and verbal swashbuckling of this new book. Indeed, the change in Dargan’s work seems to me as radical as that of an earlier poet at the same juncture in his career, James Wright."
David Wojahn, On the Seawall
Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mélange of voices—individuals passed on the street, journalists, philosophers, movie and cartoon characters, hip-hop emcees, and fellow poets—all of which build to a self-diagnosed logorrhea dementia. Dargan’s voice channels an America mentally fatigued from a decade of foreign conflict yet cautiously hopeful about the promise of the country’s renewed introspection.
In these poems, rife with the anxieties of the aughts, Dargan seeks to destabilize social and cultural landscapes believed to be settled—breaking and clearing ground to lay the foundation for a new American perspective.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
"Kyle Dargan’s third collection begins with something we rarely see in a volume of poetry these days — an honest-to-god manifesto entitled 'Breathing: A Preliminary.' In it Dargan concludes that he is 'tired of writing the poems I’m expected to write and whose language leads me to the places I’m expected to go.' As manifesto resolutions go, this sort of assertion is nothing new, but Logorrhea Dementia delivers upon its author’s promise, and often brilliantly so. Dargan’s first two collections are capable and shapely, but they don’t prepare us for the sustained imaginative ferocity and verbal swashbuckling of this new book. Indeed, the change in Dargan’s work seems to me as radical as that of an earlier poet at the same juncture in his career, James Wright."
David Wojahn, On the Seawall
Winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry
Kyle Dargan's new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagement with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D.C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan's work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
Kyle Dargan's new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagement with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D.C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan's work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
Winner of the 2003 Cave Canem Poetry Prize
Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, The Listening, searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the collection, Dargan interweaves elements of his heritage with the present day--jazz influences blend with hip-hop; neoslave narratives run parallel with the intimate tale of civil rights leaders; post-9/11 America is juxtaposed with family portraits of the sixties and seventies--to reveal the continuous, though ever changing, music of the world around us. Whether capturing the famous Ali-Frazier fight in Manila or a trip to the local barbershop, Muddy Waters or boyhood blacktop games, Dargan gives voice to the most poignant and fleeting aspects of our everyday existence. With singular incisiveness and vigor, these poems act simultaneously as psalms and elegies, praising life at the same time they lament its inevitable passing.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
"Kyle Dargan writes an attractive, melodic line that no one would mistake for prose [...]. 'The Listening' is right; Dargan has a marvelous ear."
Eric McHenry, the New York Times
Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, The Listening, searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the collection, Dargan interweaves elements of his heritage with the present day--jazz influences blend with hip-hop; neoslave narratives run parallel with the intimate tale of civil rights leaders; post-9/11 America is juxtaposed with family portraits of the sixties and seventies--to reveal the continuous, though ever changing, music of the world around us. Whether capturing the famous Ali-Frazier fight in Manila or a trip to the local barbershop, Muddy Waters or boyhood blacktop games, Dargan gives voice to the most poignant and fleeting aspects of our everyday existence. With singular incisiveness and vigor, these poems act simultaneously as psalms and elegies, praising life at the same time they lament its inevitable passing.
Ordering: Univ. of Georgia Press - Amazon - Powells - Barnes & Noble
Find in Libraries: WorldCat
"Kyle Dargan writes an attractive, melodic line that no one would mistake for prose [...]. 'The Listening' is right; Dargan has a marvelous ear."
Eric McHenry, the New York Times