We often hear statistics about survivors and victims of sexual assault: one out of six American women will experience a completed or attempted sexual assault in their lifetimes; one out of three will report these sexual assaults; 99 percent of the perpetrators in reported crimes will walk free; and so on. Unsurprisingly, we don’t know this inverse statistic. How many perpetrators of assault walk among us? That there aren’t accessible numbers for abusers quite the same as there are for the abused shows us on whom the burden falls. The poems in Kina Viola’s chapbook, Darkcutter, demonstrate the terror of these statistics by way of the poetry community. What rots beneath the rhetoric of such a community? Throughout Darkcutter, Viola warns of such violence. We see our way into the body and make it animal, and then we wonder with poetic insight over the blade. Here, Darkcutter decries the visceral irony of community: whom community is for obviates a more unsettling question of who is namelessly consumed in the name of community? Viola tells us, “I’m a better survivor than initially projected; avalanches create new environments for plant & animal life. Even XXX can’t stop the growth.” There is resilience in such ironies. “We don’t tread water,” Viola insists. “We drink it.” But enough from me. Let’s hear from poet extraordinaire, Liz Bowen. The author of Sugarblood and the limited edition chapbook, No Heroes, has this to say:

Sometimes all you want is a little Us vs. Them. Or—if we’re being honest—a lot. “They’re coming,” Kina Viola warns us in Darkcutter, and they’re an ugly and menacing Them: domestic abusers, habitat destroyers, acclaimed poets who want to kill their wives, and every complicit publisher and profiteer who’s had a hand in making sure “we are all a part of death.” Because we are, aren’t we, those of us who can be said to survive. But don’t be fooled: to cleave violence cleanly into moral categories is not Darkcutter’s game. Survival, for Viola, is more body horror than heroics, defined by razor-toothed vigilance and ruthless instinct rather than triumph or tragic innocence. They may be coming, yes, but We are waiting for them. And in Viola’s well-laid plans, we are prepared, practicing our butchering at the kitchen table and turning our own flesh foul. After all, we have one advantage over all those architects of death: we’ve lived in it. We can face the distress of a steer’s dark red shank and still taste it. Still carry a desperate hope. Darkcutter enters its world by way of Alice Notley’s underground and Ariana Reines’ slaughterhouse, with an army of creatures unafraid to call themselves meat. It is a gift to follow Kina Viola to the death of that world, where “Everything we take makes us better. It has to.” I am better for what this book takes.

—Liz Bowen