Laura Kasischke

"Kasischke's writing does what good poetry does—it shows us an alternate world and lulls us into living in it . . . The language catapults us into another plane of existence, one of facade and reflection." —New York Times Book Review
"Haunting, unsettling, and unforgettable, The Raising limns love, longing, belonging and the things we only think we know about life—and yes, death." —Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures...

On Valentine's Day, Sherry finds an anonymous note in her mailbox: be mine. As the notes continue, Sherry becomes more and more charged by the idea that she can inspire such feelings. Her twenty-year marriage is routine and she feels old, aimless, and empty now that her son is in college. When she discovers who her admirer is, she begins a wildly passionate affair with him. But her son's childhood friend is witness to the affair, her best friend is...

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.

"In her stunning twelfth poetry collection, Lightning Falls in Love, Laura Kasischke makes magic with a complex alchemy of nostalgia and fire, birdwing and sorrow. In new poems that search the murky lake for news of the past, she evokes unsayable trauma and gleans possibility. This is poetry that is existential in scope but grounded in the body, surreal yet suburban, reaching for clarity just beyond the fog of the day-to-day. Kasischke has found an...

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...

In her first collection of short stories, Laura Kasischke exposes the dark heart of the domestic-it's wrapped in shabby silk, tucked away in a dresser drawer. If A Stranger Approaches You reminds us that intersection of the bizarre and the quotidian is always at play. Memorial statues and raggedy dolls seem to come to life, a man listens to the electric menace of suburban power lines while he struggles with his failed marriage, and the little boy...

They were seventeen with perfect tans and perfect bodies. They planned on a joyride in a convertible on a hot summer day. They planned on skinny-dipping in a beautiful, secluded lake. They planned on making it back to camp before anyone noticed they were gone. What they didn't plan on was being followed by two guys in a beat-up station wagon Their day soon takes a drastic turn-all because Kristy Sweetland smiled at the wrong time, in the wrong place,...

The poems in Fire & Flower are about the images that hold the world together in the mind of a child, a woman, and the mother she becomes. The metaphors used to describe their lives are mysterious and frightening, and they accumulate in this collection as a full expression of the awe that makes us all live.

In 1903, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell and five followers founded a colony called the House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they prepared for eternal life by creating a heaven on earth. Housed in rambling mansions and surrounded by lush orchards and vineyards, the colony added a thousand followers to its fold within a few years, along with a zoo, extensive gardens, and an amusement park. The sprawling complex, called Eden Springs, was...

Plongée dans l'univers décalé de Laura Kasischke... Paru en 2013 aux États-Unis, ce recueil comprend 15 nouvelles dans lesquelles on retrouve le climat caractéristique de Laura Kasischke : l'étrangeté, à la frontière du surnaturel, un malaise palpable, souvent innommable, un éventail raffiné de violences et une tension sous-jacente. Le plus : ces formats courts révèlent l'humour subtil que l'on devine dans ses romans. Cet ouvrage a...