Dance and Disappear

"Laura Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps. [She] can recall James Wright, Randall Jarrell, or Jorie Graham, but she resembles none for long. Volatile, sometimes shocking, and seamless, her poems greet, tame, or confront the trials of puberty, medicine and marriage.... Balancing the quotidian with the estranging, fluent sentences with tumbling stanzas, and tenderness with anger, Kasischke shows as superb a feel for the bravura enjambments as for single details. Poems plummet into apparent melodrama, pull out of it, and then pull off (like stunt flyers)—maneuvers that depend on those perilous dives."—Stephen Burt, Lingua Franca

"Kasischke's fourth and fifth collections return to accustomed themes frustrated domesticity, nostalgia, motherhood, marriage leaping from personal anecdote to fairy tale to biblical or Greco-Roman myth with astonishing speed and no small dose of melodrama. At times reminiscent of Sexton, but without the bravura, Kasischke's women are often ghostly, haunted and haunting: "That girl over there, she's/ pale an exhalation a girl/ you pass through like Nebraska/ on a white-washed day." The poems often glide on wry asides ("Who can tell the difference between the state/ of grace and the state of inebriation?") or alight on prosey detail: "Once, lying naked/ beside my husband in a sweaty/ bed, an awful/ moth flew through the window/ and landed on my breast." As with Kasischke's strongest collection, Fire & Flower, these two books reveal a troubled relationship between a speaker and her body: a thwarted sexuality, an obsession with food and alcohol, a longing for physical transformation. Myth and magic (including full-blown Ovidian metamorphosis) can sometimes rescue a poem from self-pity, but can also catapult it toward the ridiculous, as when a dead bird carries a "message" in a poem about trying to quit smoking, or when a friend's drunken mother is remembered as having "poled/ us to morning on a ferry, dark/ and slow against the current, ghost-/ white and floating/ up the Nile all night...." While the poems of Dance succeed more often, the two collections are quite similar in tone, subject matter and associative structure. (June) Forecast: Kasischke teaches at Western Michigan University and has published three novels, mostly recently The Life Before Her Eyes from Harcourt. Warm reviews of the novel have stressed Kasischke's poetic language and explicitly mentioned her poetry; shelving these collections next to it should boost sales significantly."—Publishers Weekly