Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2011 for Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon). She teaches at the University of Michigan.
Poetry
July/Aug 2016
The Whole
The surgeon peels the man away from the man to get a look at the whole throbbing thing of him. The slick little change purses, the seaweed. His featherless birds […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
For the Return of the Bee
—after Bill Abernethy’s translation of the Old English charm Repeat, repeat, repeat: Lord Christ, where is our bee? She who stole the sugar bowl, sucked lingeringly from the pink rose […]
Nature's Nature
May/June 2016
On the Nature of Things
Created, all of it, from the tiniest of particles—all of it from all, for nothing can come from nothing at all, and therefore cannot be removed from all— not fins […]
Poetry
Winter 2011
At the Public Pool
I could carry my father in my arms. I was a small child. He was a large, strong man. Muscled, tan. But he felt like a bearable memory in my […]
Poetry
Winter 2011
My Beautiful Soul
It is the beggar who thanks me profusely for the dollar. It is a boat of such beggars sinking beneath the weight of this one's thanking. It is the bath […]
Poetry
Winter 2004
Summer, Here
In the beginning, the unbelievable burgeoning. Did I plant these things in the garden? What in God’s name are they? In the beginning… Electricity turned to flesh. A billion nerves […]
Poetry
Winter 2004
Inscriptions on Wax Tablets
Spring Break I’m sixteen in the Bahamas. A drunk girl on a balcony in a sundress with a piña colada. Burning, I’m about to slip out of my own memory […]
Poetry
Spring 2000
Clown
It was summer, and the clown had come to the same restaurant to which we’d come for a piece of strawberry pie. Big white smile. Wig of fire. The sun […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
Sad Song
There are women carrying torches coming toward us. Their eyes are accidents. The kind that happen on the highway in the middle of the night. The kind we glimpse as […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
Gas Chamber at San Quentin
Somewhere under the world, a gas man clangs the pipe that connects that house of death to mine. His hammer wakes the baby up at night, and even the pilot […]
Poetry
Spring 1994
Fatima
God exists. Instead we are a group of teenage girls, drunk at one of those awful carnivals in a field, out between the airport and the mall. It’s raining, and […]
Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2011 for Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon). She teaches at the […]