Instant Killer Wig
Dan Kaplan
ISBN 978-1-944682-96-5 80 pages $15.00
As I was reading Instant Killer Wig, the thought occurred to me that the book might simply—”poof”—disappear in my hands, because the poems got into my head—the way they shape shift through all the angles of uncertainty while seeking stasis in a time when the world is literally melting away underneath us. Our shapes and figures will never be united, if we want to be honest about it, and that’s what these poems are: honest—yet at the same time, open to the beautiful, dissembling present moment, like looking at a vase full of flowers, knowing that they’re both here and already gone. That’s what makes them so beautiful.
Jennifer L. Knox
Dan Kaplan’s gustatory Instant Killer Wig gusts along. His deft touch endears. Each convivial page taps the shoulder, steers the elbow, lands—conspirator, reader—along your ear. Finely observed, Kaplan kills off the old creative writing saw. Weren’t you born a writer when you learned to show not tell? Yet the grandest writers possess the courage to tell us how things are. And Kaplan’s capgun is positively popping with wisdom’s and witticism’s flowers.
Abraham Smith
Dan Kaplan is the author of Instant Killer Wig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Bill’s Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008), and the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005). His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, VOLT, Denver Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Washington Square, the anthology Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton & Co.), and elsewhere. He is managing editor and poetry co-editor of Burnside Review and Burnside Review Press. He lives in Portland, Oregon.