In the world of Elaine Kahn’s poetry, the truth is never stable. Lovers perform quotidian acts, married people devour one another, unspeakable things happen, and someone’s own story no longer feels like their own. Narrators are unreliable, assuredly telling their side of the story and theirs alone. One claims not to care what life means while ostensibly writing it all down in order to find some sort of meaning.

I have heard it said that love turns people soft but I have never been more brutal

Kahn wrote the book during a particularly hard time in her life. She was grieving the deaths of loved ones, including friends lost in the December 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. Trump had just been elected. “I had gotten to a point where I could no longer relate to my own life; its narrative had become disfigured beyond recognition,” she tells me over e-mail.

was my sex my only magic? I took a picture of the moon.

“I’ll write poems while half paying attention to TV. I will get language from advertisements, from receipts,” she says. She’ll then compile the text and look for themes or information that resonates. “Then, I try to figure out what story they’re telling. My poems don’t have a very conventional narrative, but to me there’s a trajectory of meaning. And it’s mostly about trying to learn more than report I think, trying to come to an understanding through my data sets or whatever, the language I’ve acquired.”

The most startling work in Romance or The End, “All I Have Ever Wanted is to be Sweet,” almost perfectly bisects the book. It also serves as a turning point in both narration and tone; love’s commercial is long gone. On the poem’s first page (out of two), the lines are repetitive and grow increasingly frantic. At first, the reader is unsure what sort of scene they’re entering. It begins:

I watch his arms   his face is not thinking of his face   his body is   what is the fear   can you believe in fuck   I let him   watch

Kahn doesn’t shy away from politics, nor does she see art as some entity that exists outside of reality. Though she doesn’t consider her writing a form of direct political action, she does try to do her part in other ways (hence the Bernie discount). Similarly, during the 2018 wildfires in California, Kahn raised money for those affected by selling handwritten poems. She very much believes everyone has skills that can be harnessed for the greater good. “Art is part of what makes life worth fighting for,” she says.

When I tell myself a story I decide the end.