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Kansas City Gothic by Alex Tretbar is a hallucinatory, incantatory fugue of incarceration, addiction, and survival, written in jagged, recursive fragments that chart a psychic and political topography of the American Midwest. Structured around alternating ‘movements’ and ‘codas’, the collection draws from jazz, liturgy, and urban decay to form a syntax of rupture and return. Tretbar’s lines are elliptical, layered with allusion, attuned to the rhythms of memory and trauma. Across spaces of incarceration, punk houses, hospice beds, and poisoned landscapes, the voice moves with stark intimacy and formal invention. The result is a darkly luminous reckoning with violence, recovery, and the unstable ground between personhood and place.
Author Biography
Alex Tretbar is a Midwestern writer and abolitionist. He is also the author of the chapbook According to the Plat Thereof (Ethel, 2025), and works in the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he is currently studying the archive of early issues of New Letters (1934-1951) and assisting with the Kansas City Monuments Coalition.
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