Kirsten Kaschock – författare

The Dottery is a tale of dotters before they are born. In this series of prose poems you meet their would-be-mutters, the buoys they will know, their inner warden, and the mutterers who cannot have them. The Dottery itself is a sort-of pre-purgatory, a finishing school for the fetal feminine. The five sections correspond to the conceptual set-ups interrogated within. In “wound,” The Dottery is described, as are its inhabitants and their difficulties. In “Dual,” a gender binary is introduced and (hopefully) eviscerated. “Triage” establishes the issues that plague both the dotters and those who would bring them out into the world—specifically into the idea of America (I’m Erica and I can prefer a hummer to the rose parade”). In “Fear,” failed dotters (out in the world) are described in obit fashion. Finally, in “Thief” one mutterer recounts how she stole her dotter (“a snatched piece”) to become a mutter and chronicles both her desires and regrets.

Winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry"Sophisticated and cerebral gymnastics of language sway with gravity through the poems and poetic sequences of Explain This Corpse. Throughout, Kirsten Kaschock's gestures are contemporary, jagged, and stop-start, wonderfully torqued and rippling with unexpected flights, breaks, and drops. After centuries of literary glamourizing of young, dead heroines, this poet declares a preference for survival, including its inevitable toll of aging, toward a more practical and elemental transcendence. These poems show us an extension and evolution of the legacy of Hopkins and Berryman - a sort of sprung verse for the twenty-first century, an urgent engagement with the world so obliquely signaled here." - Carolyne Wright, final judge, Blue Lynx Prize 2019

A “powerfully original” novel that explores ideas of artistic performance, gender, and family in the shadow of an unthinkable tragedy (Kirkus Reviews). Sisters Lark and Clef have spent their lives honing their bodies for “sleight”—an interdisciplinary art form that combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics, and spoken word. Estranged for several years, the sisters are reunited by West, an ambitious sleight troupe director who needs the sisters’ opposing approaches to the form—Lark is tormented and fragile, but a prodigy; Clef is driven to excel, but lacks the spark of artistic genius. But when a disturbing mass murder makes national headlines, West seizes on the event as inspiration for his new performance, one that threatens to destroy the very artists performing it—or drive them to the very edge of sanity in this unique novel from “a wildly talented writer” (Adam Levin, author of The Instructions).

A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longingIn this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land.Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past.A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.