The Jalopy Hymnal is a collection of poems that explore and confront what it means to be human and navigate life. In their exploration, these poems find comfort in the broken, honest, and vulnerable spaces we encounter every day — the drive to drink, broken relationships, economic struggle, the difficulties growing up, and the decisions we make when forced to face ourselves. These poems never give up. Never roll over and die. When the voices in these poems face failure, they return to the loss and try to find something alive. The constant search leads these poems to a variety of geographic locales, which in turn influence our understanding of environment and existence. A man in New Mexico may long for a mountain drive, while a boy growing up in rural Michigan needs the woods to survive. Though both voices seek different spaces for comfort, what drives them to the land is the desire to find something larger than themselves. These poems search to find their roles — be it in a bar or in the cosmos. The Jalopy Hymnal follows country roads and deer paths. It follows drunks and womanizers. It follows the heart and guilt and shame into a place that invites forgiveness and acceptance. These are broken down cars, old and dying dogs, leaky boats, and empty bottles that find themselves in perfect, quiet moments where they finally lead perfect, quiet lives. / Master of Fine Arts

The project approaches a medical case report I authored as a US Army Special Forces Medic titled "Prolonged Field Care of a Casualty With Penetrating Chest Trauma." Despite my authorship, the report is one of DeLillo's "millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly." Millions of these types of reports exist, and while the specific details vary, the report's voice remains uniform. The voice is mine and not mine. It is the voice of the Army, the state, and the hospital speaking through me. In its objectivity, it reflects the emotionally compartmentalized mindset soldiers train to adopt in order to function effectively under extreme stress. The report describes a combat patrol in Afghanistan during which an Afghan soldier was wounded with a gunshot wound to the chest. I provided medical care in the field for roughly thirteen hours until transfer to a coalition hospital where he underwent surgery and made a full recovery. In the report, I describe one of the most intense experiences of my life in precise, objective, medical detail. It was the first time I had been shot at, the first time I treated a casualty under fire. It is an accurate but partial depiction of myself experiencing and managing trauma. Now, years later, I work to unrepeat this document through a series of poetic erasures and individual poems that respond to, adapt, and transform the language of the report.

Poems

Sister: Poems is a collection of poetry by Liat Kaplan centered on the life and death of the author's sister, Tamar Kaplan. It deals with topics of grief, loss, and healing.

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The Communion of Saints charts a journey of faith for a young man learning to accept -- or perhaps assent to -- the Catholicism of his childhood.

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It is pointless to track one's progress along the energies of the cosmic sea, when independent of the immensely malleable sonic waves, and erase the cessation of elevation. The release never reaches the essence and the static repels them when they are devoid of the white dwarfs or their spiral arms: there is nothing tangible in not exploiting the mind/body connection. At last the summit is exalted. Miniscule solar rays expand into darkness, unhinged and must be nurtured, thought by thought, until magnified in nerve impulse and then put to rest by the still water, thus more quickly compiled, constricted into pools of electrical circuits connecting this to that, white and black and back and forth. But how seldom are we blinded to the expanding, encroaching, slashed and shredded consciousness, thinly veiled by Martian reproductions, shielding how expansive they are retreating from one another, unbraided and how often they are anchored about! Moreover, if we depart for the uncounted millennia any thought of transparent application, in its inertness, we lose sight that it is not only here and there, but also along an infinite length, a dimensionless promontory, that the seamless past/future only multiplied. The absence of the bottom/top and its technology disguised that everywhere timeless presence has remained static since the stars muddied the cosmos--------