Lilies Without

Laura Kasischke

Lilies Without is Laura Kasischke’s seventh volume of poetry. Widely admired for her startling use of metaphor and nervy, surprising syntax, she peels back the skins of our ordinary lives to reveal underlying anxieties and complexities. Funny, irreverent, personal, and at the same time unnerving, these poems take us to familiar places made entirely strange so that we may see them again as they really are, without the disguises we invent so as to remain blind to what disturbs us.

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ISBN: 9781931337366

Format: Paperback

Terrible Words

I’ve said these words before, exactly these.

I said them in winter, in the car, at night,
warmed by the cigarette lighter’s dangerous eye.

I said them in summer
when the flowers were in bloom
but there were too many biting flies to go outside.

Truly, I

was the first to say them. I was
their mouthpiece, their translator. On

the park bench in spring, these
words blew through me
like a few loose
tissues on the breeze. And then, in autumn,
the blossoms of them

hardened into fruit, which
fell disastrously out of the trees. And tonight—

Tonight they are birds
which have blown back to me,
and their wings in the air being beaten make
only the sound of a mountain
of books
slipping swiftly into the sea.

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

“… The poems in Laura Kasischke’s Lilies Without achieve their ends by revealing the deeper (and darker) implications of everyday life, messing with our notions of the domestic and the sacred. Kasichke’s poems are powered by a skillful use of image and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase… Lured ahead by Kasischke’s patented casual lyric, we find ourselves surprised by the heat of the implications that follow.” —Austin American-Statesman

“… If Kasischke’s poems get half the attention they deserve, they will be praised… not just for their music, but for their demographically representative qualities: for the way they capture the excitements and the anxieties of a generation just after that generation realizes that it, too, has entered adulthood, that its teens are a memory and its mortgage a burden… She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns… The future will not—should not—see us by one poet alone. But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.” —Boston Review