A Month of Robert Kloss

I try not to toot my own horn here at Atticus Review, but to be honest I first became aware of Robert Kloss when he reviewed a book of mine. Since the review was a glowingly positive one, it’s no wonder that I continued to pay attention to Kloss and his writing. But over the last couple years Robert Kloss has been producing glowing-review-worthy writing of his own. In 2011 he published a “Nephew” of the late Mud Luscious Press, How the Days of Love and Diphtheria, a horrifying and beautiful journey into the fall of some kind civilization, destruction and rebuilding of family, nightmare. A year later he published a novel, The Alligators of Abraham, that is at once a pseudo American history, an alternate universe, and a plague and war novel. The guiding force in all of Kloss’s work so far, I think, is the strength of language. It soars. Utilizing anaphora, assonance, consonance, alliteration, and a poet’s innate sense of our language’s rhythms, Kloss weaves stories that he tries to keep as character- and narrative-free as possible. The result is epic-scale storytelling and lyric mastery in prose form. As I think I found out in my interview with him, this all seems to come about organically, without Kloss thinking too much about it. And that—ask any writer—is what any good reader or listener is looking for.

In this issue:

“Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: An Excerpt”