Pleasure and divine worship comingle within Strap. Delusional, hungry, and obsessed, this is a poetics of pain that proposes joy — an ecstasy that begs for release. Strap asks: Must the abused become the abusers? How does one know if love is genuine? These poems tie knots that are deeply erotic, with lyrical ropes of ancestral wounding and mysticism. The book explores the false binaries of suffering and prayer, trauma and kink, in a quixotic perversity that smacks of survival by the revelation of secrets. Strap's engine thrusts the reader from one page to the next by fueling a grief that feels almost beguiling to consume, or perhaps a collision of the senses so seductive as to become utterly consumed by the poems themselves.
Dan Kraines is a queer poet of Viennese, Bolivian, and Ukrainian heritage. Strap is his first full-length book. He has published two chapbooks: Licht and Jaffa. Dan works at the writers' residency Hawthornden Brooklyn on weekends and for the poet Sharon Olds during the week. He taught creative writing and creative nonfiction at the Fashion Institute of Technology and ELA at high schools for underserved students prior to his current work. Queer Longing, his PhD dissertation, won the Susan B. Anthony prize for gender and sexuality studies from the University of Rochester. He lives in an old tenement apartment on the Lower East Side.
"Dan Kraines is one of the most gifted literary minds that I have ever taught….daring, surprising, unconventional, a refreshment because everything that he does proceeds from an original relation to his material. He is, in other words, 'the real thing,' not only as a poet but as a critical intelligence. As Jarrell with amazing prescience once said of Lowell, he is 'a talent whose ceiling is invisible. I don't say any of this lightly. '" — Frank Bidart, Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
"I didn't just read this book, I encountered it. That is to say, it was as if I entered a gallery or a museum and stood before a magnificent tapestry of words that threaded and wove through all the interstices of every possible human landscape, be they physical, emotional or natural: love, war, faith, geography, sexuality, politics, eroticism, religion, history—and on and on. All with the unrelenting verve as well as the tenderness to render the profane as commonplace, and the commonplace as divine." — Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Homeland of My Body
"Dan Kraines' debut Strap is a gorgeous meditation on sex, power, victimhood, and tenderness. I enjoyed Kraines' direct addresses to lovers and abusers, the book's embodied intelligence. I'm transfixed by the way Kraines' speaker can observe other people-a lens that does deeper work than projection. Because the heart of the speaker stays soft, stays singing, it can show me anything it wants. Kraines writes, 'Is a trap of victimhood / that it creates an abuser?' Strap untraps old scripts, inviting me to get out of my own way. I'm jealous of anyone reading it for the first time." — K. Iver, author of Short Film Starring My Beloved's Red Bronco
"'I am in it for the song.' In Strap, Dan Kraines's devastating, incisive language threads in and out of shorelines, occupied cities, and pixelated rooms to reveal an inner landscape intricately woven with and complicated by the violences and sensuous pleasures of history. From the beginning of the collection, these poems don't hesitate to name: 'the start of my pleasure is the pain of another.' And yet each poem continues to plumb and unravel and disorder, against conclusions about desire, empire, abuse, queerness, worship. Strap is a collection that breaks itself open, that unmakes you." — Emily Lee Luan, author of 回 / Return
"If only moments of then could sweeten me up, the poet writes; Can I accept the flaws that broke me into being here? From the risk of self-love come the remarkable poems of Dan Kraines: discovery of terror and grace, the body. If one must succumb to memory as to assault, is it the strap that keeps hold? Or insistent faith that beauty is never far from pain, nor hurt from redemption." — Honor Moore, author of A Termination
"Dan Kraine's Strap is a collection beautiful with difficulty, each poem voluptuous and restrained. The poems are elemental, fierce, searing, and scarred by the violent contradictions of desire. 'I am the twister twisting /around myself again' he writes, and we, his grateful readers, are made truer by his restless intelligence and this stunning debut." — Victoria Redel, author of I Am You and Paradise
"Dan Kraines' debut collection Strap revitalizes my faith in poetry and in humanity. This is a collection of tenderness, of kink, of constant care and after care. At its root, we are reminded that the tools of Kink can be mistaken for the tools of oppression if not distinguished by consent, love, and pleasure. Kraines provides us a roadmap to stand against oppression in all its forms, while dictating the need for kink within the queer space. Strap instructs us that liberation and love have always been intertwined. These poems dance at this intersection, restoring light into sex and desire." — Jason B. Crawford, author of YEET!
