Killing It
"Gaia Rajan’s Killing It deeply considers the ethics of poetic observation: “I worry that to be a poet is to sit and wait for beautiful things / to die. To exploit distance. To steal / flight.” With extraordinary narrative deftness, Rajan guides his reader from phantom water sounds trapped in a knee to the televangelical economy of Ohio with skillful, almost mathematical wordplay and uncanny insight....The poems are not about distance or flight, then, but what is still holy about the proximate and the fallen, what we do with what has already been deemed damned."
—Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys and The Kingdom and After
"It’s best read in the fall, or the dusk, any time filled with long shadows and liminal outlines...Killing It is a taste of the crepuscular: beautiful, easy to wander in, yet full of potential danger."
—R. Thursday, Up The Staircase Quarterly
"In his outstanding new chapbook Killing It, Gaia Rajan explores queerness and the overwhelm of outside reactions to that queerness. “I lived / in a narrow house where every night the ceiling / closed on me like a lid.”...Rajan manages to fit an anthology’s worth of striking images into this chapbook, and I’m already aching to reread it."
—Paige Lewis, author of Space Struck
