W. Todd Kaneko reads from THE DEAD WRESTLER ELEGIES next week at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop with BC Edwards!

- 7 pm - 

These elegies and illustrations by Asian American poet W. Todd Kaneko cover themes of loss, love, regret, redemption, and remorse. Kaneko's poems and illustrations blend Charles Bukowski's raw-boned verse and Randy "Macho Man" Savage's devastating elbow drop to mine the history of professional wrestling and examine complex relationships between fathers and sons.

"Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle. There’s nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment, and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. The DWE is all of this, and it’s so damn fun, too. Rarely has a book of poetry (even illustrated poetry) managed to be so profound while being so entertaining. More than a pack of wild horses, more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons, more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you."
—Matthew Gavin Frank, author of Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid, Its First Photographer, and The Morrow