Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You by Erik Hofstatter
Aqueduct Press (July 2026)
Reviewed by Joshua Gage
Erik Hofstatter is a prose poet of brutality and elegance. He explores the darkest depths of what we’re capable of without flinching. Born in the wild lands of the Czech Republic, he roamed Europe before subsequently settling on English shores, studying creative writing at the London School of Journalism. His work appeared in various magazines and podcasts around the world, such as HWA Poetry Showcase XII, The Literary Hatchet, Wicked Library, Manor House Show, and The Black Room Manuscripts Volume IV. Other works include The Hurricane Caged Inside of Her, Stone Martyrs, and Bankrupting Sky Banks. His newest collection is Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You.
On October 1, 1965, a group of left-wing soldiers abducted and killed six top Indonesian army generals in Jakarta, claiming they stopped a right-wing plot against President Sukarno. From October 1965 to March 1966, there was a series of large-scale killings and civil unrest primarily targeting members and supposed sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), alleged communist sympathizers, Gerwani women, trade unionists, ethnic Chinese, atheists and other non-Muslims, and leftists in general. According to the most widely published estimates, at least 500,000 to 1 million people were killed. Hofstatter’s book Pain Is a Chain. Move, and I’ll Hear You. is set against the backdrop of this massacre.
We know the speaker of these poems is culpable in the violence and atrocity. There is a detached sense of ennui in these poems, the speaker willing to maim and decapitate with a kind of guilt-free mindlessness. Part of the horror that Hofstatter is exploring is the way war, and the financiers of war, create mindless killing machines from ordinary human beings. We see that literal mindlessness in these poems, the distance the speaker stands from the deaths. Take, for example, these opening lines from an untitled piece:
How long is a piece of string?
Or how long is a piece of wire, in my case.
That’s what I chose.
To strangle the quiet.
To heal you with no sound.
This speaker is completely unperturbed and unemotional about the deaths they’re causing, which makes those deaths all the more senseless and horrifying.
Erik Hofstatter has created a unique document of horror. In a series of over ninety untitled prose poems, he places readers in the midst of one of history’s most ignored and horrifying atrocities. Rather than deal with the horror and find meaning in the death, Hofstatter explores this massacre through a lens of violent objectivity and homicidal indifference. The combined effect is terrifying, and fans of historical horror will thoroughly enjoy this prose poetry collection.
