Starred review from October 18, 2021
Magic and survival are at the center of Kasischke’s marvelous 12th poetry collection. A master of the symbolic, Kasischke (Where Now) evokes shadowy figures and totems: a tongue “as white as a strip of paper” in a glass jar; “a stranger wearing high black boots in the rose garden;” “a bird that makes its nest/ in the highest towers/ of the children’s hospital/ out of the softest/ children’s hair.” But these poems are set in reality—on highways, in kitchens, backyards, and bedrooms—and many recall trauma plainly, without the protections of allegory: “My mother woke me up/ to tell me it was time for swimming lessons again./ Yes, I got raped, but, still, I had to learn/ how to swim.” Oscillating between the real and the surreal, and memory and imagination, these entries will leave readers feeling as if they’ve emerged from these pages as though stumbling out of murky water—“the deepest, the darkest, the/ muddiest lake of them all/ in which the bones of corpses/ dissolve into cattails”—having paid witness to the secret world hidden there. This book is a triumph of storytelling by a master of craft.
Starred review from November 1, 2021
A National Book Critics Circle Award winner for Space, in Chains, Kasischke delivers intriguing scenarios in cut-glass, page-turningly readable verse that carries shadows underneath. A woman and a vulture are paralleled to reveal the burdens of freedom ("Not to have wanted to go.// But to have flown"). A flower girl's photograph presages personal and global trauma, the red-eye effect suggesting "a frozen horse, and/ a frozen field, my/ country's wars, and/ my own child's future." In the title poem, lighting falls in love with a range of linked characters, as the speaker concludes unperturbably "then my own lightning's work here/ is almost done." VERDICT Inventive, if more unsettling than whimsical, these top-notch poems acutely observe an unpredictable world. Highly recommended.
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