What It Wasn't

"Kasischke 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 "a box of baby pigs"; golf in hell; home confectionery; fifth grade; an ominous lettuce; the trials of puberty, medicine, and marriage. . . . Kasischke handles these earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps."—Stephen Burt, Lingua Franca "Kasischke's breathless and disjunctive rhetoric becomes the stuff of a frightened and exuberant intelligence, sometimes rapturous, sometimes crazed, but more often than not deceptively canny in its ostensible abandon, its sentence fractures and strange pairings. . . . The result is . . . a book both personal and ambitious in scope, full of startling sympathies, little horrors, and always the irrepressible compulsion toward beauty."—Bruce Bond, Michigan Quarterly Review