“This book takes me right back to the Carnage Years―yours, too―sacrificed to love. If only I, you, had possessed Elaine Kahn’s wisdom and wit. These poems are lacerating, coy, bloody, and so true I wanted to memorize lines from them.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers Romance or The End takes up the tools of romantic narrative in order to perform the rupture between self and story that occurs at the onset of trauma. Using known and pathologized literary arcs, Elaine Kahn unspools the fundamental instability of truth, love, and language to create an experiential portrait of narrative’s power to both disfigure and restore. ROMANCE or THE END This is a book about love. And it is a book about lies. Love can be a lie, but it is also always true. This is a book about truth. This is a book about story. There is no such thing as a true story and so there are no stories in this book. Without a story, there is separation. This is a book about separation. Everything is a story. Even the truth. There is nothing truer in this world than the lie of love. Praise for Romance or The End Popsugar , 1 of 25 Brilliant Books Coming Out This Month "This book is crazy and wonderful like a basket full of snakes." ―Eileen Myles, author of Evolution and Cool For You “This book takes me right back to the Carnage Years―yours, too―sacrificed to love. If only I, you, had possessed Elaine Kahn’s wisdom and wit. These poems are lacerating, coy, bloody, and so true I wanted to memorize lines from them.” ―Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers "There aren’t 'good guys' and 'bad guys' in Kahn’s game of love, only flawed humans who make mistakes even when trying their best not to. The book plunders traditional love story tropes to offer a more authentic, and sometimes more cynical, counternarrative. Arranged into eight chapters, plus an introduction and an epilogue, the deceptively simple love story arc becomes a vehicle by which Kahn examines the complexities of contemporary relationships, gendered power dynamics, sexual violence, and recovery. How to reconcile desire in the wake of trauma is a central theme, reflecting Kahn’s interest in complicating an experience that’s too often framed as black-and-white." ―Ruby Brunton, Poetry "Kahn pushes against fuzzy cliché . . . Romance in Kahn’s poems can be singular, tactile, inanimate . . . There is a nothingness, an oblivion, running through this book, one as bleak as it is hopeful, as forbidding as it is liberating. There is darkness, for sure, but also humor and light, relaying of the mysterious truth and necessity of the fictions we tell each other and ourselves." ―Rob Goyanes, BOMB "Kahn's lines are so sharp they threaten to cut you, as brutal as a knife held against your throat . . . Romance or The End doesn't hold anything back." ―Kerry Cardoza, Chicago Reader "Kahn’s second book of poetry belongs in the heartbreak canon with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009) or Anne Carson’s The Glass Essay (1995). Her fragments―expertly stitched into verse―are spare and unsparing. I return to Kahn’s poetry again and again for its specificity of language, which cuts across life’s stickiest delusions to reveal a burning core." ―Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Frieze "Elaine Kahn’s Romance or The End is a river of hot concrete: you flow with it erotically because it flows. Her words follow you around like windshield wipers or dried flowers in a jar and hold you captive by letting you go. She turns you into a sweetheart in the middle of the day and a credit card for romantic transactions at night. Her delivery is quick, but not hurried. Time is on her side because she has turned poetry into a road that can’t be bifurcated with prolixity. If she is swift, it’s because it’s impossible to get rich after a car accident. If she is inside your psychic c*nt, it’s because she knows the difference between therapy and poetics." ―Vi Khi Nao, author of Sheep Machine and Fish in Exile "History tells us there is Love, and there is War. Not much is said about the tension between, where the narrative of Romance pulls itself razor thin in our struggle to reconcile the two. With the brusque candor of the intimate present, dripping the acid of fresh feeling, Elaine Kahn sets, in her poems, a blank, a space, a scene, in which to enshroud and unshroud herself with the mixed fantasy, trauma, and assumption produced when we yield, unwittingly, to Love. Like all nursery rhymes, her tale is truest when its simplicity disarms, its conclusion remains dark. We find Romance, pinned down, with its skin peeled back―and Kahn is its God, whose weapon is levity, sharp between her teeth." ―Trisha Low, author of Socialist Realism and The Compleat Purge "Not since Satan has anybody’s 'little tongue' given head this good in language. Not just head and godhead, Romance or The End gives us tragically more than we deserve. It is even, like vengeance, and just, lik