Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Disintegration Made Plain and Easy

 

another day another

Another day another 

Soup god I

Am simple I 

Will dunk my

Bread into the 

Rain whatever juices

In the nightbowl 

I make love

My mouth is 

Full of bread

The moon stops 

Like a clock

Overhead god how

I fall how 

Must I eat

Twice my weight 

In salt

I’m really enjoying the narrative connections, disconnects and accumulations of the poems in Bellingham, Washington poet Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy (Chicago IL: Piżama Press, 2025). This is the first volume in a new press founded and run by Chicago poet Benjamin Niespodziany, “dedicated to showcasing and uplifting the voices of the strange, the uncanny, the absurd, and the surreal.” I’ve been aware for some time that Niespodziany has quite a good eye for such work, his social media and substack long offering remarkably good examples of poems and poets I might otherwise have not been aware, from the contemporary to the historical, working the surreal short, condensed and/or prose poem. 

Disintegration Made Plain and Easy is set in two cluster-sections of poems, interspersed with illustrations (as well as an “INTERMISSION” between the two sections of poems) by Los Angeles-based illustrator, animator and interaction designer Gautam Rangan. “I like to get naked // I guess because it makes // Me think about death,” Araki-Kawaguchi writes, to open the first poem in the collection, “i like to get naked,” which stretches across three pages in a monologue reminiscent of the classic “Sex at 31” series (a series I’m sure no one actually recalls anymore), around death, sex and moving through time. The accumulative rhythms of Araki-Kawaguchi’s poems I find quite fascinating, as they suggest themselves as purely self-contained phrases piled atop each other, offering, instead, real subtle twists and turns connecting phrases and rhythms as much between the lines as through. And then, of course, there are the incredible “about the author” poems, six of which are sprinkled through the collection, the second of which, a prose poem, begins: “The most striking thing of Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi’s poetry is he is so damn FINE. The words combining on his page aren’t great. But as a reader you can imagine him freaking GOOD in his cutoff shorts. Tan as lobster. At a rectangle in starbucks. Implement between writing claws. Gazing moronically into the blank page.”

Araki-Kawaguchi’s poems are surreal, funny, dark and odd, composed via direct statements that accumulate across distances, even through the prose poem structure, writing sentences that pile atop each other to form shapes. His use of the double-space between statements and phrases, for example, even provides a kind of pause for the reader, holding back what otherwise might seem propulsive through other poems, including those set as more direct prose-stanzas. There is something quite remarkable in the way he twists and turns expectation, offering from the offset a point from which one couldn’t even begin to suspect, once you’ve read one or two examples of his work; he offers establishing direction almost as red herring, playing with expectation, and rushing off into completely unique and unknown realms. “Devil devil in my heart,” the poem “devil devil in my heart” begins, “I created earth and heaven / In my own image yes / It is all extremely poor indeed / None of the horses have heads / How terrifying they are to ride / And feed I must pulverize / Their grass in my mouth [.]” His work provides a fine balance between laughter and horror, surrealism and whimsy in a series of poems that can’t help but delight. “You know what a man needs,” he writes, to open the poem “what a man needs,” “I think we can all guess what he needs // The power to see himself clearly [.]”If the father of the American prose poem,Russell Edson, worked against expectation in his work, Araki-Kawaguchi’s Disintegration Made Plain and Easy is working at a whole other level of surprise, whimsy and surreal twists. This is an incredible collection.

he is going to have to take it

I am not throwing a party
No I am not throwing a party 

But I would like to hire a clown
Yes I would still like to have a clown today 

I will enjoy him even if I am alone
I will enjoy him more if we are left alone 

I do not like the pressure to laugh
It is like being strangled 

With an invisible twine
I will only laugh when it is true 

I will only laugh when my body feels
Like it would otherwise disintegrate 

Because of the clown’s movement
Because what he does for my amusement 

In the quiet empty room
In exchange for a lot of money 

I put into the hands of him
I will only laugh when he earns it 

I will put a lot of money no matter what
No I am not throwing anything 

He is going to have to take it from me