Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. Three sections of ten poems each, which revel in the gorgeous possibilities of language even as they acknowledge the impossibility of language to contain the things it describes: But there will always be/ storms and gray// that settle on their shoulders blurred as sparrows// before they fly away. Seasons/ and the names for them will change. (from A is for Almost) Kasischke's world...is a world in which grace and horror, beauty and carnage, tragedy and hilarity commingle.-Harvard Review. Kasischke is the author of two previous collections of poems, WILD BRIDES and HOUSEKEEPING IN A DREAM, and the novel SUSPICIOUS RIVER. She has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently teaches at Washtenaw Community College in Michigan.
Synopsis
"Kasischke's world. . .is a world in which grace and horror, beauty and carnage, tragedy and hilarity commingle."
-Harvard Review
"Kasischke peels back the blander surfaces of the quotidian as if to find the unconscious realm just beneath the Formica."
-The Antioch Review
"Kasischke's breathless and disjunctive rhetoric becomes the stuff of a frightened and exuberant intelligence, sometimes rapturous, sometimes crazed, but more often than not deceptively canny in its ostensible abandon, its sentence fractures and strange pairings ... The result is a book both personal and ambitious in scope, full of the startling sympathies, little horrors, and always the irrepressible compulsion toward beauty."
-Bruce Bond
Synopsis
The poems in Fire and Flower are about the images that hold the world together in the mind of a child, a woman, and the mother she becomes. The metaphors used to describe their lives are mysterious and frightening, and they accumulate in this collection as a full expression of the awe that makes us all live.
About the Author
Laura Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004) and Dance and Disappear (winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.