In Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Georges Bataille writes, “existence itself is at stake in the transition from discontinuity to continuity. Only violence can bring everything to a state of flux in this way, only violence and the nameless disquiet bound up with it.” Against continuity, against narrative, against the dream of lyric stability, Rauan Klassnik’s new collection A Slow Boiling Beach extends the atrocity aesthetics developed in Holy Land and The Moon’s Jaw, submerging the reader in the “slow boiling” of Bataille’s “state of flux.”

As a result of the book's movement between discontinuity and continuity, the narrative quickly becomes collateral damage. Klassnik’s work has experimented with discontinuity and rupture before. In The Moon’s Jaw, this fragmentation was most evident on the sentence level. In A Slow Boiling Beach, like in Holy Land, the sentences mostly cohere as stable, declarative units in a prose poem frame, which establishes an expectation of narrative continuity. Instead, the discontinuities appear on this level through sudden and disorienting shifts of the perspectival frame, vague pronouns, and speakers lacking stable subject positions.

For example, “New Regimes” begins with a “drain spiral” as “[m]y dreams circle the pain. Revolved by it.” The poem then moves through a breakneck series of visions including a spit-roasted fetus, a fly “dreaming in cold blurred sunlight,” and a deluge of horses. By the end of the poem, the speaker is sucked into the dream-spiral and the borders of the self immediately dissolve: “I’m circling the pain. // A chainsaw.”

The poems in A Slow Boiling Beach also deal with visual perception and distortion. Sometimes, this emerges through the technology of the eye itself, as in “[a]n eye contorted to a blur” or the announcement that “[i]t all dilates as I stare into it.” In “Mother and Child,” violence, visual abstraction, and the language of painting mingle in a design reminiscent of Richard Siken’s ekphrastic poems in War of the Foxes or the skewed impressionism of Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Picture Degas brandishing a sharp implement: “The sound of a train, ship, flute. Children drift into the trees. Heads on poles, on the back of a truck, firing into the air. They sing birthmarks and stitches all over me. Red and green mirrors. A blurring knife.”

Klassnik’s visual abstraction, protean speakers, and narrative disjunction add up to a compelling confrontation with the lyric. The poems in A Slow Boiling Beach are not easily contemplated from a distance; they are closer to Artaud’s idea that “in the ‘theater of cruelty’ the spectator is in the center and the spectacle surrounds him.” Or as Klassnik writes, “[t]he menace is total. And overwhelming.” In fact, language consistent with the lyric tradition often appears in excess in these poems, pushed to its limit as a way of sabotaging that very tradition. These poems are drowned in flowers, birds, and song, but there is something sickeningly oversaturated about it: “Little birds are buzzing. They are filled with knives and they are guilty.” We see “[s]low motion flowers unfolding” and we hear a “song bursting forth, swaying from side to side, and, like the body, turning slightly on its axis.”

In a 2014 interview, Klassnik observes that "often, I just hate the word 'poetry' and would prefer my work to be labeled something like 'language chunks.' But then again most of what I write is clearly ‘poetry.’” A Slow Boiling Beach shows that Klassnik is still concerned with these distinctions, although the angle of attack differs from his previous collections. This book dismembers the lyric, bathes it in acid, and serves the resulting slurry in a crystal glass.