The Dead Wrestler Elegies
The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Championship Edition takes the now out of print original book and adds new poems and new illustrations that examine love, loss, regret, redemption, and remorse. This new edition, a more complete book of poems, mines the history of professional wrestling to examine the complex relationships between fathers and sons.
Praise for The Dead Wrestler Elegies
“In Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies, Gorgeous George is forever beautiful, flexing his biceps and preening about the squared circle. Andre the Giant’s legendary tales still resound in the empty amphitheaters and armory mess halls. And young men gathered around their television sets on Saturday nights still get a glimpse of the baby-oil-slick theater. Kaneko’s poems leap from the top turnbuckle and make the heart pirouette like the choreographed turn off the ropes. When the lights in the arenas go out, these poems, in conjunction with Kaneko’s stunning visual work, honor both these wrestlers and an era. Through Todd Kaneko’s fierce but tender elegies, we come to understand that the gods are mortal after all.”
— Oliver de la Paz
“This chiseled pantheon of superbly-illustrated poems in Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies transubstantiates the flesh of babyfaces, heels, champions, and losers to shimmer again within the static halo of late-night TV and nostalgia’s VHS—grapevined between the gaze of a father and son finished by a runaway wife and mother’s over-the-shoulder backbreaker. Sheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity’s glory and gory days, where—“[b]ecause the heart is only as strong as the flesh surrounding it, / the body only as strong as a man can stand it to be”—the body’s currency is a site of both invincibility and vulnerability, transcendence and decay, Kaneko’s lines moonsaulting a muscular parabola between cartoon and icon, kitsch and myth, the timeless cage match between ecstasy and grief.”
— Lee Ann Roripaugh
“Todd Kaneko’s The Dead Wrestler Elegies is some kind of miracle. There’s nothing else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment, and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points at which we all, eventually, submit. The DWE is all of this, and it’s so damn fun, too. Rarely has a book of poetry (even illustrated poetry) managed to be so profound while being so entertaining. More than a pack of wild horses, more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons, more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you.”
— Matthew Gavin Frank
“From the headlocks of Ed “Strangler” Lewis to the love life of “Macho Man” Randy Savage, The Dead Wrestler Elegies vividly evokes the greatest legends of professional wrestling. But these larger-than-life portraits are, more deeply, elegies for a lost family: for a departed mother, for a father who shared his love of wrestling through old VHS tapes. W. Todd Kaneko makes the wrestling ring an allegory of childhood, of masculinity, desire, and loss. “At a wrestling match,” Kaneko writes, “we are all young again, fathers and sons.” It’s a landscape of fantasy and dreams, where “there is no such thing as falling, only belief in flight,” but also of mortality, where “the statuary becomes an ossuary.” Kaneko’s spectacular, haunting illustrations are the perfect complement to these bittersweet poems, in which the bruised heart grapples with memory and love: “I pull sorrow into my arms at night, / the way a man pulls another close.”
— Timothy Yu
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POLAROID OF YOU AND JACK BRISCO
You are 25 in 1973, your arm around
my mother that night in a Texas parking lot.
You wearing a wispy beard and leather jacket
next to your motorcycle, a jackrabbit’s grin
as you stare at the camera. You don’t see
anything but my mother beside you,
her teeth bared in a sneer or a smile.
That woman’s sneer is for me and you,
but her smile is for Jack Brisco, the world
wrestling champion standing next to her.
Brisco, who knocked men down
with an elbow smash, then tied them
in his leglock until the referee stopped
the match. Brisco, who made girls swoon
with his babyface smile and shaggy hair
after beating a man down and strangling
him with his knees. Brisco, giving me
a big thumbs up while his other hand
lingers near my mother’s waist.
I wish this photo was mine when you were
alive and willing to talk about riding
with your wife across America, stopping
in every city with a wrestling ring.
You could tell me about that night
Jack Brisco won the championship,
about the day you discovered a woman
can never be owned by a man. You could
tell me a thing or two about those shapes
we all make with our mouths.
this poem first appeared in Water~Stone
KAYFABE / KAY-fayb / noun
Etymology: Possibly stems from carnival slang for “protecting the secrets of the business.” Some believe it comes from a version of Pig Latin for “fake” or the phrase “be fake.”
- The portrayal of action and storylines associated with professional wrestling as being authentic competition and conflict and not scripted or staged.
- The suspension of disbelief used to manufacture feuds, angles and gimmicks surrounding a professional wrestling match.
- The strict observance of in-ring personalities and rivalries by professional wrestlers in public, even when not wrestling or on camera, in order to preserve the illusion that their contests and storylines are real