Kascha Semonovitch writes and sometimes teaches philosophy in Seattle. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College and an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a great deal of undocumented experience in motherhood, love, and travel. Her poems have appeared in Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Crab Creek Review, and other journals.
Book Reviews
Fall 2009
Erotic Dialogues
Same Life, Maureen N. McLane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 128 pp. $24.00, hardcover. Intruder. Jill Bialosky. New York: Knopf, 2008. 96 pp. $25.00, hardcover. Maureen N. McLane’s […]
New Voices
Winter 2009
Postcards
1. Belgium, outside Liège Fruit in Europe is sweetBut not sweeter. The flowersAre petite; no smaller. I tell you this my nieceWho was just born becauseYou cannot be born in […]
New Voices
Winter 2009
New
The patient: “He greeted her several timesAs if she had just arrived.” I identified.It is indeed a gift—both maddening andAwful—to be seen as Always new,To evoke exactlyThe same astonishmentAt eleven […]
New Voices
Winter 2009
Trio
They were both good men,Only amplified. As if some infinite Operation were performed: if N =Love, then between Lancelot, Arthur andGuinevere, N (xt) = [Lt1, At2 ,Gt1 … ], where […]
New Voices
Winter 2009
If
The purpose I mean is, to show what reason we have for believing that there are in the constitution of things fixed laws according to which events happen.—Richard Price, 1763 […]
New Voices
Winter 2009
Birch, Pine, Palm
1. I want to make love to old men, to kissThem the way you’d kiss a tree. You’dNo more expect the tree to move Than to die. The tree would […]
Spring 2012
The Art of Facts and Artifacts: Jeffrey Yang’s Vanishing-Line
The first and last words of Jeffrey Yang’s new book, Vanishing-Line, are "place": the first poem is called "Place" and the book closes with a quotation from Robert Duncan on place.
Winter 2012
Life, Lines: Susan Howe’s That This and Julie Carr’s Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
The beginnings and endings of poems must have something to do with the beginnings and endings of lives. At least this is the suggestion made by two recent books, one by Susan Howe, That This, and the other by Julie Carr, Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines.
Summer 2011
A Dream in Horses: Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow
Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, NY, 2011. 80 pages. $23.00. In Double Shadow, Carl Phillips has a “dream / of horses. Two of them. Fitted with blinders.” The harness restricts […]
Winter 2009
Companion Species (II); La Faute; History; Natality; Gare du Nord
Companion Species (II) I thought this was a loneliness that would subside. I thought it was a curtain That might divide: seeking a partition, or a drawstring, I pressed into […]
Spring 2011
Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis: This Book Is Not “Like” Anything You’ve Ever Read
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010. 112 pages. $23.00 So, you want to know what this book is “like”? What category it fits in? Well, you can go to hell. Or […]
Fall 2009
Erotic Dialogues
Same Life. Maureen N. McLane. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 128 pp. $24.00, hardcover. Intruder. Jill Bialosky. New York: Knopf, 2008. 96 pp. $25.00, hardcover. Maureen N. McLane’s […]