Laura Kasischke – författare

Laura Kasischke, the critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling poet and author of The Raising, returns Mind of Winter, a dark and chilling thriller that combines domestic drama with elements of psychological suspense and horror—an addictive tale of denial and guilt that is part Joyce Carol Oates and part Chris Bohjalian.

On a snowy Christmas morning, Holly Judge awakens with the fragments of a nightmare floating on the edge of her consciousness. Something followed them from Russia. Thirteen years ago, she and her husband Eric adopted baby Tatty, their pretty, black-haired Rapunzel, from the Pokrovka Orphanage #2. Now, at fifteen, Tatiana is more beautiful than ever—and disturbingly erratic.

As a blizzard rages outside, Holly and Tatiana are alone. With each passing hour, Tatiana’s mood darkens, and her behavior becomes increasingly frightening . . . until Holly finds she no longer recognizes her daughter.

Tales of the ghostly and supernatural by some of Michigan’s finest fiction writers.

For Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them editors Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke asked twelve celebrated Michigan writers to submit new stories on one subject: ghosts. The resulting collection is a satisfying mix of tales by some of the state''s most well-known and award-winning writers. Some of the pieces are true stories written by non-believers, while others are clearly fiction and can be funny, bittersweet, spooky, or sinister. All share Michigan as a setting, bringing history and a sense of place to the eerie collection.

Ghosts in these stories have a wide range of motivations and cause a variety of consequences. In some cases, they seem to dwell in one person''s consciousness, as in Steve Amick''s "Not Even Lions and Tigers," and other times they demonstrate their presence with tangible evidence, as in Laura Hulthen Thomas''s "Bones on Bois Blanc." Spirits sometimes appear in order to communicate something important to the living, as in James Hynes''s "Backseat Driver" and Lolita Hernandez''s "Making Bakes," to change the course of events, as in Anne-Marie Oomen''s "Bitchathane," or to cause characters to look inside themselves, as in Elizabeth Schmuhl''s "Belief." The supernatural stories in Ghost Writers visit a mix of Michigan locations, from the urban, to the suburban, and rural. Authors find ghosts in family farmhouses, downtown Detroit streets, an abandoned northern Michigan lighthouse, gracious Grosse Pointe homes, a mid-Michigan apartment complex, and the crypt of a Polish priest in the small town of Cross Village.

Taylor and Kasischke have assembled a collection with a diverse mixture of settings, tones, and styles, ensuring that Ghost Writers will appeal to all readers of fiction, particularly those interested in the newest offerings from Michigan''s best fiction writers.

Diana stands before the mirror, preening with her best friend, Maureen. Suddenly, a classmate enters holding a gun, and seventeen-year-old Diana sees her life dance before her eyes. In a moment, the future she was just imagining is sealed by a horrific decision she is forced to make.

The novel takes us through Diana’s uncertain steps into womanhood—her awkward, heated forays into sex; her fresh, fragile construction of an identity; and her equally tenuous steps as an adult, protecting her beloved daughter and holding onto her successful husband.

Laura Kasischke has crafted a story of consciousness that encompasses the truth of a teenager’s world and the profound transformation of that world at midlife. Resonant and deeply stirring, this novel finds piercing beauty in the midst of a nightmare that echoes like a dirge beneath each new spring.

"Kasischke's intelligence is most apparent in her syntactic control and pace, the way she gauges just when to make free verse speed up, or stop short, or slow down."—The New York Times Book Review

"Kasischke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."—Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke's poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. And

also the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children's laughter.

Laura Kasischke is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction. Her novel Her Life Before Her Eyes was adapted for the screen and starred Uma Thurman. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

"Kasischke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."-Austin American-Statesman

The Infinitesimals stares directly at illness and death, employing the same highly evocative and symbolic style that earned Laura Kasischke the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Drawing upon her own experiences with cancer, and the lives and deaths of loved ones, Kasischke's new work commands a lyrical and dark intensity.

Laura Kasischke is the author of eight collections of poetry and seven novels. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power." —Publishers Weekly

“Every poem is exquisitely crafted, with crisp, clean lines and imagery that dazzles."—The Washington Post

“For Kasischke… poetry is a kind of revenge on the existential limits that it describes"—Los Angeles Review of Books

Laura Kasischke's long-awaited selected poems presents the breadth of her probing vision that subverts the so-called “normal." A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke showcases her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday—whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family. As literary critic Stephen Burt wrote in Boston Review, “The future will not see us by one poet alone….If there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose."

This incandescent volume makes the case that Laura Kasischke is one of America's great poets, and her presence is secure.

From "Dear Water":

I am your lost daughter and, as always, youare listening & fish. ThoughI sift you for sunlight, itruns from me in glistening pins, vanishesin the wavering mapof your ungraspable heart. When Ireach in, youswallow my cold hands again, swallowthe joy they'd hold. . .

Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

As technology and consumerism inch to the forefront of society, I Was Bonnie and Clyde illuminates small collisions between life and death.

In Laura Kasischke’s new collection, every moment contains an infinity: the mundane in the monumental, and the monumental in the mundane. As technology and consumerism inch to the forefront of society, I Was Bonnie and Clyde illuminates small collisions between life and death, from “The worm in the grave of JFK” to “the mole hauled out of the ground / by the dog to die in the sun.” Ghosts, both real and imagined, haunt and heighten these poems. Calling upon the weariness of Peter Rabbit, the poetry of Bonnie Parker, and the electrocution of Topsy the elephant, Kasischke evokes history and tragedy with a quiet, conversational reverence. Through their repetitions, their exclamations, and their laments, these poems serve as both mirror and reflection, reaching out as the reader gazes in.

"Kasischke''s intelligence is most apparent in her syntactic control and pace, the way she gauges just when to make free verse speed up, or stop short, or slow down."—The New York Times Book Review

"Kasischke''s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."—Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke''s poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, In Chains create a visceral strangeness true to its own music.

So we found ourselves in an ancient place, the veryair around us bound by chains. There wasstagnant water in which lightningwas reflected, like desperationin a dying eye. Like science. Likea dull rock plummeting through space, tossingoff flowers and veils, like a bride. And

also the subway.Speed under ground.And the way each body in the room appeared to bea jar of wasps and flies that day—but, enchanted,like frightened children''s laughter.

Laura Kasischke is the author of thirteen books of poetry and fiction. Her novel Her Life Before Her Eyes was adapted for the screen and starred Uma Thurman. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, she teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.

"She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns. When denizens of the 22nd century, if we get there, look back on our era and ask how we lived, they will take an interest both in the strangest personalities who gave their concerns verbal form, and in the most representative. The future will not—should not—see us by one poet alone. But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.” —Boston Review

“Kasichke’s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase.” —Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke in her own words: "I realized while ordering and selecting the poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns body parts, dresses, and beauty queens. These weren''t conscious decisions, just the things that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my life, and which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. The beauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me, in all their feminine loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction—congeniality. And then—Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen—all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given."

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.

"Kasischke''s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."—Austin American-Statesman

The Infinitesimals stares directly at illness and death, employing the same highly evocative and symbolic style that earned Laura Kasischke the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Drawing upon her own experiences with cancer, and the lives and deaths of loved ones, Kasischke''s new work commands a lyrical and dark intensity.

Laura Kasischke is the author of eight collections of poetry and seven novels. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power.” —Publishers Weekly

“Every poem is exquisitely crafted, with crisp, clean lines and imagery that dazzles.”—The Washington Post

“For Kasischke… poetry is a kind of revenge on the existential limits that it describes”—Los Angeles Review of Books

Laura Kasischke’s long-awaited selected poems presents the breadth of her probing vision that subverts the so-called “normal.” A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke showcases her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday—whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family. As literary critic Stephen Burt wrote in Boston Review, “The future will not see us by one poet alone….If there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.”

This incandescent volume makes the case that Laura Kasischke is one of America’s great poets, and her presence is secure.

From "Dear Water":

I am your lost daughter and, as always, youare listening & fish. ThoughI sift you for sunlight, itruns from me in glistening pins, vanishesin the wavering mapof your ungraspable heart. When Ireach in, youswallow my cold hands again, swallowthe joy they''d hold. . .

Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

Gardening in the Dark, Kasischke’s sixth book of poetry, continues to explore the transformative power of imagination. Her poems take us to the flip side of human consciousness, where anything can happen at any time. Tinged with surrealism, her work makes visionary leaps from the quotidian to sudden, surprising epiphanies.

"She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns. When denizens of the 22nd century, if we get there, look back on our era and ask how we lived, they will take an interest both in the strangest personalities who gave their concerns verbal form, and in the most representative. The future will not—should not—see us by one poet alone. But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.” —Boston Review

“Kasichke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase.” —Austin American-Statesman

Laura Kasischke in her own words: "I realized while ordering and selecting the poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns body parts, dresses, and beauty queens. These weren't conscious decisions, just the things that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my life, and which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. The beauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me, in all their feminine loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction—congeniality. And then—Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen—all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given."

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.