The Dead Wrestler Elegies Championship Edition

W. 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. 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

When the lights in the arenas go out, the poems and Kaneko’s stunning visual work in The Dead Wrestler Elegies honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko’s fierce but tender elegies, we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all. -OLIVER DE LA PAZ

Sheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity’s glory and gory days, where the body’s currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability, transcendence and decay, Kaneko’s lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon, kitsch and myth, the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief. -LEE ANN RORIPAUGH

These larger-than-life portraits are, more deeply, elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother, for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood, of masculinity, desire, and loss, a landscape of fantasy and dreams. -TIMOTHY YU