Lightning Falls in Love

Laura Kasischke

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 entirely new way to spin beauty and pull breath from that which must be dredged up and revived before it can be left behind.

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ISBN: 9781556596360

Format: Paperback

When a bolt of lightning falls in love

with an old woman, sex is reinvented
as the world’s first toaster oven.

When lightning falls in love with a middle-
aged woman, lightning gives

birth to an electric guitar. When
lightning falls in love

with a married man, his wife becomes
an arsonist. When lightning falls

in love with an arsonist, she
gives birth to a son. When

lightning falls in love with my son, I wake up
to the streaking-comet scream of the fire alarm

in the hallway of a motel
on the wrong side of an ocean, and

I think, Thank God. I think: All
this lightning has always had

a plan, and if lightning can make plans, as if
lightning goes on, like lightning’s plans, and

will go on
long after I’ve gone—and then

my own lightning’s work here
will be almost done.

About the Author

Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and currently living in Chelsea with her son, Laura Kasischke is the author of twelvecollections of poetry and nine novels. Space, in Chains (2011) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Where Now: New and Selected (2017) was longlisted for the National Book Award. Kasischke is the Theodore Roethke Distinguished Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan, and she has received many honors for her works, including the Juniper Prize, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and the …

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Reviews

“Kasischke delivers intriguing scenarios in cut-glass, page-turningly readable verse that carries shadows underneath. . . . Inventive, if more unsettling than whimsical, these top-notch poems acutely observe an unpredictable world. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review

“Magic and survival are at the center of Kasischke’s marvelous 12th poetry collection. A master of the symbolic, Kasischke evokes shadowy figures and totems. . . . Oscillating between the real and the surreal, and memory and imagination, these entries will leave readers feeling as if they’ve emerged from these pages as though stumbling out of murky water—’the deepest, the darkest, the/ muddiest lake of them all/ in which the bones of corpses/ dissolve into cattails’—having paid witness to the secret world hidden there. This book is a triumph of storytelling by a master of craft.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Kasischke is an expert of perspectives. She exercises precise control over where to look, while reminding you that you are also being watched.” —Rain Taxi

“Laura Kasischke’s latest poetry collection, Lightning Falls in Love, is a charming address to time and the eternities sustained in memory. In fifty-two poems, Kasischke moves multilaterally over the many folds and features of memory, both personal and fantastic.” —ZYZZYVA