“A choice is a fiction”: On Koss’s Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect

by Erin Vachon

Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect by Koss. Diode Editions, 2024. 47pp. $12

Reading Koss’s debut collection Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect (Diode, 2024) is like studying a brutal fight between two pranksters: a poet and the universe. Both fighters approach the match with scathing humor and unexpected swerves. The universe really kicks the poet’s ass for a time, enlisting support from a mother wielding a demon-repelling Bible, a father self-mythologizing into should-have-been music legend, and an uncle enlisting a teenage lover to fuck his teenage relative (albeit unsuccessfully). Death multiplies the brute impact in lost loves and friends. The universe plays dirty, rubbing devastation in the poet’s face—even the medium who foretold death dies. Koss counters overwhelming absence with self-aware poetics, refusing the silences which suffocate abuse and trauma. The poet staggers to their feet, triumphant against their history by insisting: “I spoke the unspeakable.” They offer poetry as counterbalance to every blow, springing up again and again. Dancing Backwards is a queer reckoning, bare knuckled and unrepentant. Koss’s debut collection is proof that poets get the last laugh, even if they’re spitting blood onto the mat by the end.

We may need queer poetry now more than ever. Dancing Backward is a collection on queer survival, demanding witness with biting humor. Koss captures the overwhelming effect of traumatic accretion, when one exhaustion stacks upon the next. Pain is silenced, not by one person, but a family or a community. You write a prose poem about death when not one loved one, but everyone keeps dying, and you must testify to the cosmic joke of moving forward, despite. You lose trust in the medical field not because of one therapist, but a catalog of them. In “My Therapist Sez,” a montage of therapists blurs into a therapist-monolith, breaking all boundaries within the medical space. Koss opens the psychiatric revolving door of ridiculous authority from the first line: “My therapist says he has to cancel our first appointment to go trick or treating.” Therapist-monolith skirts one toe over the line, then another. They say, “his wife is leaving him because he never got his Ph.D.” Complain about their dog who shits everywhere and buy the poet dinner. Identify the boundaries they cross, before assuring, no, they don’t want to fuck the poet. Say they’re gay, also admitting they fucked their brother. Under an assault of red flags, the poet attempts to mourn their partner’s death, hoping for someone to listen. They speak about a kundalini awakening accompanying four years of unrelenting trauma, a composite of “life crises, energetic rewiring, or paranormal experiences.” Monolith-therapist details their own “spiritual” orgasms in response. Koss describes a therapeutic process which not only devalues its patient, but leaves them with more to carry. Their poetry simulates the sheer exhaustion of subjecting yourself to therapy as its own trauma. I read Koss with deep relief, another queer person launched through a listening machine on repeat cycle, offering up a trauma history with each new face. Koss’s poetry captures the futility of explaining pain to someone who predetermines your worth through outdated language, who meets your trauma with fumbling abuse posturing as empathy.

Koss circumvents problematic systems by refusing to play the game, leaning into gaps and fictions: “The swell thing about fragmented / histories is the liberties one / can take when filling in the blanks.” A sister wields a rock band as stand-in genealogy: “My sister / tells people my mother / is a go-go dancer for the Butthole / Surfers.” The lie outlines the truth, a space where another answer should be. In “Love Song for a Friend (Kim),” Koss creates a list of lost opportunities after a friend’s death. They repeat, “Didn’t have sex with you” to heartbreaking effect, like a mind wandering back to wasted moments, over and over. Their final grief lingers: “What I’d do to you if you were still here.” Koss often backtracks through alternate timelines and allows different possibilities to remain. “Friday, Saturday” retraces their partner’s suicide, doubling each moment: “You have not yet killed yourself but are missing,” then “You are dead or not dead.” Each moment is a liberation and a mental trap. Did this happen? Or that? Koss not only allows questions to stand without answer, but insists that they do. Their poetry creates Schrödinger’s Cat conundrums that preserve life alongside death, without glossing over the realities of loss. Dancing Backwards is a Möbius strip of queer love and grief, honoring every shade of emotion at once.

If Koss breaks a rigid relationship to trauma and violence, they also understand this ability to be privileged. A poet moves their chair “in relation to the TV,” safe from “its explosions, its propaganda, and its subliminal messages.” This, they argue, is how “art is conceived.” Dancing Backward is the performance of shifting perspective, suggesting that poetry is always a privileged act, even when painful. When Koss ponders the murder of young girl found handcuffed to a swing set in “Flint Girl Handcuffed Along Dort Highway,” they picture that “she questioned the act without / anger, with an open sense of wonder / he taught her how to meditate that day / those hours and minutes sitting still waiting.” Death is a main character in Dancing Backward, fickle and permanent. When more victims die, Koss writes, “I could be the dead dyke on the highway / Frozen to pavement.” In shifting toward death, they come back to life. They refuse to shy away from inevitability, reclaiming their dead self, listing the “Ten Things to Remember ‘Bout Me When I’m Dead” like an introduction to future events. They name themselves as a ghost as well, alongside those that they grieve: “Grandma I haunt your home / years later.” Ghosts becomes as present as the living, while Koss lingers at the border between worlds, wondering at those who wander on the other side. If the collection title promises to dance backwards towards pluperfect, Koss imagines alternate pasts before the past, times which make as much sense as a strange present.

Koss writes one of the fiercest collections that I have read in a long time. Their voice is wry and self-aware, like the grounded friend you wish you had met a long time ago. Half of me wants to shoot copies of Dancing Backwards out of a cannon at every inept therapist and abuser, demanding if they see themselves in the poetry. The other half of me wants to gift Koss’s collection to every queer friend forced to survive the same, assuring them we will win in the end. Dancing Backwards is life-giving for everyone fighting for their lives against an unsparing universe. I wish I wrote this formidable collection, but I am so glad that Koss did instead.

Koss is a queer, mixed race writer and artist with numerous publications in both print and online journals. They were published in Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, and other anthologies and won the Wergle Flomp 2021 Humor Poetry Contest with “My Therapist Sez,” first published in diode poetry. Find them on Twitter and Instagram, or stop by their website to keep track of their activities.

Erin Vachon is the Multigenre Reviewer-at-Large for The Rumpus and the Senior Reviews Editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. They write and edit outside Providence, RI.