Kansas City Gothic

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.