Dance and Disappear [Paperback]

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.
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"Laura Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps." -- Stephen Burt,

The subject matter of these poems is ordinary: motherhood, marriage, sexuality, middle age, ambivalence, mortality, the Midwest. But in addressing these topics, Laura Kasischke finds and reveals the strangeness of the most common traditions and dilemmas. These are poems that work to fuse reality and dream, life and death, logic and illogic. Kasischke precisely renders the experience we have of ourselves as physical and time-bound beings existing in a psychological and spiritual realm that seems to have no barriers or laws. The poems in this collection are both narrative and lyric, grounded in reality but also surreal, at once fully realized and merely hinting at what might be.

Winner of the 2001 Juniper Prize.

Laura Kasischke is the author of three previous books of poetry, "Wild Brides," "Housekeeping in a Dream," and "Fire & Flower," and two novels, "Suspicious River" and "White Bird in a Blizzard." Her new novel, "The Life before Her Eyes," is forthcoming. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan.