Lannan Literary Selections

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 very air around us bound by > chains. There was stagnant water in > which lightning was reflected, like > desperation in a dying eye. Like > science. Like a dull rock plummeting > through space, tossing off flowers and > veils, like a bride. And > > also the subway. Speed under ground. > And the way each body in the room > appeared to be a jar of wasps and > flies that day—but, enchanted, like > frightened children's laughter.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times writes: “The poems in Mr. Vuong’s new collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds…possess a tensile precision reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s work, combined with a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like appreciation for the sound and rhythms of words. Mr. Vuong can create startling images (a black piano in a field, a wedding-cake couple preserved under glass, a shepherd stepping out of a Caravaggio painting) and make the silences and elisions in his verse speak as potently as his words…There is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.”