Place and The Body in Dan Kraines’ Strap

Allie Serapilio

Book Review

A review of Dan Kraines’ Strap (Iron Oak Editions). Purchase the collection directly from the publisher here.

How do we conceptualize belonging? How do the disparate places and communities we come from manifest concurrently within our minds and bodies? Dan Kraines’ deeply observational, meditative voice reverberating throughout his debut poetry collection, Strap, reveals the fickle nature of belonging and place, reminding us of the power of the body.

As a Jewish, queer poet of Viennese, Bolivian, and Ukrainian heritage, Kraines’ work often centers on diaspora and heritage, textured by identity multiplicities and reckonings with selfhood. His speakers are distinctly present in their bodies—listening, watching, absorbing—and thus rooted in their physical and mental surroundings. 

While location often acts as solid forces within text, Kraines renders seemingly immutable, tangible locations in flux, lending the collection’s disparate locations—from Bremen, to Jaffa, to Boston—a unified corporeal agency. In flux from one section to the next, natural forces live and breathe like human bodies in Kraines’ work, rendering a paradoxical sense of grounded fluidity. “Shanah Kholem” begs the question central to the collection’s consideration of location, bodies, and community: “Can you smell the sea when it is nowhere near us?” 

The first section of poems in the collection, originally published by FIT Press in Kraines’ chapbook Jaffa, offers a lyrical depiction of the Levantine region in which natural forces infiltrate the environments of their speakers (who are often in diaspora); in “Makhtesh Ramon,” the speaker “[wakes]/as a broom busk tree, bending towards you in the Negev,” while in “Golan Heights,” “The sadness of wildflower and poppy/[well] up in [the speaker’s] rib cage.” The desert and its flora become inextricable from the body, bending and moving like human bodies do. 

Juxtaposing motifs of sand and water exhibit a similar sense of agency, acting as bridges by which the speaker connects with disparate lands and figures. Moving through the collection as if corporeally, sand and water settle in pools, trailing around the verse and spilling from one piece to the next. Sand acts as a physical manifestation of the connections between speakers and addressees; the speaker of “Limestone Grave” declares “How could I be/anything other than bereaved if/in sand I feel your shape,” while the addressee of “The Second Temple” “[has risen] out from the dust.” Sand is also evoked through images of dryness. In “Golan Heights,” Kraines visually connects bumpy, textured desert ground with the surface of a human tongue: “Land that is a tongue/cut from its root. Dry air fills/my mouth.” While the speaker may not be physically located in the locations rendered by the imagery—as indicated by references to dreams, distance, mirages—the agency that sand, and by extension, land, exhibits breaks down physical boundaries between disparate places, in favor of a more complex, multi-layered understanding of spatiality and belonging. 

Water operates similarly to sand, moving with poetic agency to wet the dry sands of the desert. Kraines renders water and its swift, physical strength ubiquitously within Strap; rain “[shuts] the roads” in “Hurricane,” while “the earth is drowning” in “Broken Open.” While water is inherently mutable, with rivers and lakes forming based on the topography surrounding them, images of storms and floods declare water’s mutability its inherent strength. Oppositely, water’s stillness and grace remind us of the idiosyncratic movements of past lovers in “The Second Temple,” while memories return to the speaker as waves rise in “Galloping Through a Dream.” Water holds the capacity to both inhibit and guide the movements of the figures it surrounds, acting as a simultaneously strong and tender, passive and active body within the verse. 

The most compelling examination of water’s simultaneous fluidity and strong corporeality is in the poem “Crossing on Staten Island Ferry,” its titular setting placing the speaker in a state of physical flux, moving between two land masses. One moment mid-poem proves especially poignant:

…I wish

I were not a man. Glacial secret. I have only one

as if the secret were not frozen and solid and massive 

but a hole, a channel of empty traveling to the floor

beneath the water that circles this island city. 

Does anyone ever think about how low

this floor would take us, if we dove to it?

We go low enough to travel, taking the subway

under streets, rivered under gravel and water, 

descending only as far as finding our way requires.

Here, in contrast to moments throughout the collection where speakers seem to mentally move seamlessly to disparate locations via dream or mirage, fluid water imagery works to paradoxically cement the speaker in their surroundings, and animate place with bodily characteristics. Kraines’ image of “the water that circles this island city” visually renders New York City boroughs as distinct land bodies, while the verb “circles” lends the islands a human-like corporeality. “Taking the subway/under streets, rivered under gravel and water” furthers this depiction of corporeal place; subway trains move through tunnels like blood through veins, like water flowing down a river. The resulting multifaceted image creates a parallel between place and body, where place operates as an extension of the body, and thus, body as an extension of place. 

The most poignant image and rendering of this parallel in this piece is in the deceptively simple line “Glacial secret.” The term “glacial” suggests something monumental and immoveable, but nevertheless moving slowly and unstoppably. As sheets of glacial ice appear stagnant, they continuously move across their landscapes, depositing sediment and melting, as bodies in place can appear similarly unmoving but are nonetheless breathing, living—cementing themselves within and altering the physical locations around them. 

Kraines’ observational, generative verse and multi-faceted imagery renders complexity in belonging and selfhood, suggesting an existence in which disparate places can exist concurrently within the mind and body, and an existence where land and body share an inherent spirit. Through these myriad representations of place and corporeality, Strap keenly asks readers to re-examine seemingly mundane relationships to the spaces and locations they find themselves within.

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Strap

Dan Kraines

Iron Oak Editions

76pp

$18

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Allie Serapilio is an Upstate New York-based poet, and an English and Art History graduate of Skidmore College. In addition to her role as a Prose/Poetry Reader for L’Esprit, she is a Researcher for Indirect Books’ forthcoming publication Rachel Cusk & The Art of Narration. She is additionally a Poetry Reader for Epiphany Magazine. .