<p>W. Todd Kaneko's <em>The Dead Wrestler&nbsp;Elegies </em>is some kind of miracle. There's nothing&nbsp;else like it. The book succeeds as guilty pleasure and&nbsp;love affair, tribute and indictment, myth-making and&nbsp;intervention, a chronicle of obsession and disappointment,&nbsp;and a meditation on everything from gender politics to the points&nbsp;at which we all, eventually, submit. More than a pack of wild horses,&nbsp;more than spray-tanned human biceps confusing themselves for pythons,&nbsp;more than any kind of mania, really, this book is gonna run wild on you.&nbsp;<strong>-MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK</strong></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">When the lights in the arenas go out, the poems and Kaneko's stunning visual work in <em>The Dead Wrestler Elegies </em>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. <strong style="color: rgba(0, 255, 255, 1)">-OLIVER DE LA PAZ</strong></p><p class="ql-align-justify"><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">Sheened with baby oil and juice, these powerful poems explore the constructed and painful nature of masculinity's glory and gory days, where 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. <strong style="color: rgba(0, 255, 255, 1)">-LEE ANN RORIPAUGH</strong></p><p><br></p><p class="ql-align-justify">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, a landscape of fantasy and dreams. <strong style="color: rgba(0, 255, 255, 1)">-TIMOTHY YU</strong></p><p><br></p>