Secret Raven - Preorder

Franz Kafka suspected that every sentence he finished was a life he failed to live. The more he wrote, the less of him remained. In Secret Raven, Daniel Good takes that suspicion as his own until it is no longer clear whose disappearance is being recorded. Cutting into the letters and diaries, as well as psychological studies of Kafka, and threading his own invented lines through the wreckage, Good works seamlessly between the found and the fabricated until the difference vanishes. Conceived as a single poem broken into sixty-four pieces, meant to be read whole, the book returns to the old themes estranged and recombined: a failing body, the immensity of the father, a family unrealized, and that to give one’s life to writing is to be slowly erased from it. What’s left is both a portrait of a grieving life inhabited from the inside out and a book that reckons with the cost of devotion.