I want you to know what I mean: Strap by Dan Kraines

Re:Viewed by clay scofield

Summer 2026

RE:VIEW

In Strap, poet Dan Kraines crafts a debut collection of poems that unravel across lines and pages, breaking themselves open with a persistent hope of making something new in the margins.

Deeply mystical and unabashedly queer, these poems stay in the contradictions: between hurt and want, victim and abuser, illegibility and desire to be seen. Dan Kraines balances confrontation and confession to craft a vulnerable meditation on violence and desire. From the barber’s chair to sacred monuments, these poems reveal the interconnectedness of the personal and global landscape, and the incredible possibility of making ourselves new.

I talked with Dan Kraines about Strap, its themes, and the creative process behind the collection.

clay: I love opening this collection with “Mutiny,” which recounts the common queer experience of trying to recreate oneself through a haircut. It is at once confessional, flirtatious, erotic. At times, I lose track of the poem’s subjects, as they blur together through the use of direct address and pronouns. The conversation stretches across line breaks. This poem introduces so many themes that recur in the collection. The title “Mutiny” also reflects both how the poem’s subjects reject conventional gender identities and how they reckon with past violences. Can you tell me about the origin of this poem and how you decided to open the collection with it?

Dan Kraines: Yes! I love the argument you make here for “Mutiny”’s effective opening to the book. I wrote the poem from my flirtation, from my body, from my truth, from my wish to change. I first published it as Donuts (which recalls sufganiyot, jelly donuts eaten on Hannukah). But the title “Mutiny” might work more deeply and communicate more immediately about the poems that follow, a mutiny from within, “themes that recur,” as you say. The first section of the book unfolds in the Holy Land, after “Mutiny.” October 7^th was a mutiny from within the ranks of Hamas. 

I wanted the first poem in my first book to be unabashedly queer.

c: Reading Strap, the following lines from “Dead Sea,” stay with me: “how can the past, with its constant / influence, violence in our bodies, / ever be a source of healing?” You address this question from so many perspectives throughout: formative memories, relationships, war.

Do you think that poetry can be a source of healing? What does poetry do as a mediator of the past?

DK: To start healing, touch grass, sweat, sweetly kiss someone. Poetry can actualize feelings and reify the past that lives within us, for all its sharpness and sensuality. It can be a cathartic song, a seduction, a hushed cry to someone. 

“Dead Sea,” and those lines you quote from it, embodies paradox, and the contradictions, even irrationalities, present with Strap. The refrain at the end of “Dead Sea” does not promise healing, but, for some, liberation, whereas for others, a threat: from the river to the sea. Can the violence of revolution engender freedom? It did not with two Intifada or over the course of the last three years. 

Poetry preserves a record of the past, with its emotional texture, and the lived experience under regime, regime of ourselves as well. “What are the tyrannies you swallow?” Audre Lorde asked in her essay asking us to turn our silence, our repressed words, into language and action.

c: How has your relationship with this collection of poems developed over time? Some have been published in previous chapbooks, and we see these emerge together as a cohesive collection.

I know in your acknowledgments you note the poems featured in the book’s first section, Jaffa, predate October 7, 2023. As a collection of poems addressing the ongoing violence and genocide in Palestine, have these poems changed for you since 2023? 

DK: Violence predates October 7^th, predates 1948, and, like you say, violence is ongoing. Is there beauty and, with it, hope for peace, for liberation? Longing for such is drum up by the rhythms of words in my work.

Capitalism as a crushing force—the opposite of an artform unfolding in a mystical order—has felt to me more dire, more crushing since I first wrote and revised these poems. For instance, “how can the past, with its constant / purchase on us ever, / be a source of healing” were lines I wrote, until purchase seemed too commodified. Our influences and the ways we want to influence the people near us (and far from us) persist. 

Haunted, I still imagine the steam of a shower choking me, like I do in “Zohar,” as gas is air, gas is air. I cut that repetition, but the repetition of trauma, its causes and its reverberations, worries me. I worry that I need to be hurt for pleasure. And that my pleasure risks being hurtful.

I still ask, “is the trap of victimhood / that it creates an abuser?”  

c: I was struck by the conversations between poems—in “Le Cirque” you end with: “WIth her memory of escaping Europe in the hull of a ship, / Only to arrive in Africa, to huge Nazi flags hanging in the harbor.” Across the page, in “Crossing on Staten Island Ferry,” under “the dazzling Statue of Liberty,” the poem’s subjects “recount / our families’ escape to America again, searching / for some story that will bring us closer.” 

As the poems speak to each other, they weave together aspirations of healing in a new place, to be confronted again with violence. How do you bring Strap together as a collection of poems, particularly in choices like this where poems create new meanings in conversation with each other?

DK: Strap is mystical and the poems make mystical connections: I studied Kabbalah, for example, as I wrote and ordered poems; I believe in the mystical power of women, of those I come from and those I aspire to be. We perceive mystical connections when a word reappears and our dreamy vision appears again, close to us, as if a mirage; so I ordered poems to make connections, such as the reappearance of a star and a star-shaped blade, a necklace with a star snapped off.

Like you say, deliberately making poems face each other “across the page” creates a feeling of connection between them.

Strap in its order, tying themes together, tightening incongruence to desire, is me asking you to think about intersectionality and its limitations. 

c: It can be such an intense process to not only face but deeply interrogate our own capacity for violence. These poems move fluidly between the states of one who is harmed and one who harms. I stayed with the line: “Seeing violence is your way of controlling / violence in you” from the poem “Remember, Body,” both as a reminder of the body’s potential for violence and also remembering the violences of being in a body. Poetry sometimes emerges from intense observation of one’s internal landscape or other’s behaviors. What is poetry’s role in revealing or controlling our internal violences?

DK: I love that question. Writing and revising and reordering poems in a sequence helps to control compulsive thoughts. Intrusions of internal violence feel better while I’m writing, even or especially as I’m articulating embarrassing feelings and vulnerable questions. 

Sometimes, to write a good poem, I have to imagine my anti-self, a doppelganger I would rather escape. This has been true, I think, at least, in the work of the greatest poets, who turn their most honest moments inside out and reexamine what falls from their heart’s pocket.

c: At times, there is disorientation through pronoun slippage. With direct address throughout, the “you” becomes fluid across subjects, and at times the “you” and “I” are also blurring together. 

I was struck by these lines: “I’m illegible / Didn’t we talk of being fluid and of between states? / And of the many who had to die / building this bridge into the riverbed:” What role does fluidity or illegibility play in your poetic process?

DK: Fluidity is so important to me and to my work: fluidity as a reading experience and as an expression of how I move through the world around me. Once, in a car ride on the way to dancing, with Top 40 turned way up, a friend said her gender was becoming more fluid—and that can happen around me. Sorry!

I hang onto illegibility as I have often made myself invisible. In publishing Strap, I’m giving up invisibility to people around me. And illegibility came to seem less important. I want you to know what I mean. To embody feeling illegible, to me, necessitates writing in a dire code, as if for the captured and heartbroken. 

c: Finally, the title Strap succinctly captures themes of violence, sex, desire, and power at once, and through a single word, reveals the interconnectedness you explore. Can you share about how you came to this title? 

DK: Well, I came up with this title by thinking of the word strap-on in the first poem and again in the poem “Harness.” I strap themes together across disparate locations, “Next Door” and in “The Holy Land,” and strap carries different associations, such as the strap of prayer tefillin, or the strap of smacking someone. Strap, and as the poems say, to want it, to suck it and fuck it, is something many “straight” men desire, I’m told. Hard to say if I came to the title or if it came to me.

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DAN KRAINES is a queer poet of Viennese, Bolivian, and Ukrainian heritage. Strap is his first full-length book. He has published two chapbooks: Licht and Jaffa. Dan works at the writers’ residency Hawthornden Brooklyn on weekends and for the poet Sharon Olds during the week. He taught creative writing and creative nonfiction at the Fashion Institute of Technology and ELA at high schools for underserved students prior to his current work. Queer Longing, his PhD dissertation, won the Susan B. Anthony prize for gender and sexuality studies from the University of Rochester. He lives in an old tenement apartment on the Lower East Side.

Intermedia artist and poet, CLAY SCOFIELD (Brink Associate Arts Editor, they/them) creates multimedia work that threads poetic narrative, performance and moving image. clay’s work is featured in publications including Black Warrior Review, Number, and Wussy. They have performed and exhibited nationally and held residencies with Cucalorus and The School of Making Thinking (SMT). They have MFAs in digital art (Indiana University, Bloomington) and poetry (Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and serve on the board of directors of SMT. clay is always on the brink of over-caffeination.

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