In Kasischke’s newest collection, every moment contains an infinity: the mundane in the monumental, and the monumental in the mundane. I Was Bonnie & Clyde illuminates small collisions between life and death, from “that last suitcase circling / its last loop / for all of eternity” to “the mole / hauled out of the ground / by the dog / to die in the sun.” Ghosts haunt and heighten these poems as they draw upon the independent weariness of women throughout history: Bonnie Parker, Lady Godiva, Amy Winehouse, a handbook’s unnamed perfect hostess. Lovingly self-effacing, Kasischke evokes vulnerability, disbelief, and tragedy with a quiet, conversational reverence. With wordplay and exclamation, lament and ironic humor, these poems invite as they reflect, reaching out to a forbidding world.
ISBN: 9781556597312
Format: Paperback
Praise for Laura Kasischke
“Laura Kasischke’s poems probe the lives of supposedly ordinary women, along with the extraordinary emotional tumult those lives may conceal… Kasischke’s intelligence is most apparent in her syntactic control and pace, the way she gauges just when to make free verse speed up, or stop short, or slow down.”—New York Times Book Review
“Laura Kasischke’s poetry, like Sylvia Plath’s, often begins in and circles domestic, everyday experience: going to the country fair, trying on a dress, being pulled over by the police for speeding, eating fast food. Yet those experiences constantly point elsewhere, to perils beyond. The movement between quotidian, even drab everydayness and the miraculous, magical, surreal associations brought about by musical imperative and the imagination’s verve is from one form of incineration to another, always providing light because the light of burning cannot be separated from the light of realization… Since Rimbaud, poets have known there was no choice but to become a stranger to the self, but the self in this book never finds a stable site of detachment from which to view the inevitable drift towards the end; it refuses that sort of complacency. ‘The teacher was death. The blackboard was the sky.’ Often the poems read like sequences, arias of dislocations, dis-belongings, literal and figurative mis-fittings, conveying a nearly cheerful richness even as their focus is on dread and decay, on isolation and grief. Stitched through is the dark humor of someone who knows she has a lot to lose, has already had a hell of a time losing half of it and soon enough will lose the rest. And somehow, Laura Kasischke makes it all seem nearly a celebration.”—Dean Young