Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection

The subtitle of Kyle Dargan’s sixth collection, Panzer Herz, is a bone-chilling advertisement: A Live Dissection. The specimen struggling through that dissection is masculinity, and specifically masculinity’s most conspicuous, least anatomized subspecies: heterosexual, cisgendered, its emotions shielded within a “Panzer Herz”—a German compound meaning “armored heart” or “tank heart.” Panzer Herz conducts a retrospective tour through a lifetime of masculine models: fathers, TV gunslingers, anime swordsmen, larger-than-life Black icons like Biggie and Magic Johnson. It’s also a quest across English for the right terminology for masculinity, trekking from the opening poem’s title, “Pericardiectomy” (the removal of the heart’s membrane sac), to childhood memories of a carpet “bladderbaptized by the cat.”

How, Dargan wonders, did he develop such a rigid conception of masculinity? Maybe life under patriarchy is a compulsory education, a curriculum in gendered expectations and sexist stereotypes. Several titles in Panzer Herz suggest college seminars, such as “Performance Studies: O.P.P.,” or “Remedial Heteronormativity,” which revisits Dargan’s preadolescence:

“Man-law” I first violate at age ten—
my wandering fingers not appeased by picking
through my cousin’s video
game cartridges, Sports Illustrateds.
Rather, I let my tips trace their way
around his bedroom—exhuming
sheathed New Mutants and Excaliburs,
probing for more between the expansive cleavage
of seat cushions.

Dargan enacts those “wandering fingers,” not yet governed by “Man-law,” with an ingenious succession of line breaks. Note the opening enjambments, each line grasping for the next; the end-stopped dismay of “Sports Illustrateds.”; and the momentary titillation of “expansive cleavage,” falling clownishly onto “seat cushions.”

Dargan’s studies sometimes end with neat morals, summaries of “What I learned.” His best poems evade easy resolutions; most poets would consider the poems’ subjects too graphically anatomical (ejaculation), morally unflattering (unexplored misogyny), TMI or WTF (the racial dynamics of Sarah Jessica Parker–themed sex dreams). A poem about dating apps recognizes “a good question” as one for which “no answer / rushes from my cerebral sac or my scrotum.” Dargan knows only one organ strong enough for questions that good. Panzer Herz does justice to it, its contradictory demands, its ceaseless drive: “My heart—it thinks too much.”