Laura Kasischke

"On a snowy Christmas morning, Holly Judge awakens, the fragments of a nightmare--something she must write down--floating on the edge of her consciousness. Something followed them from Russia. On another Christmas morning thirteen years ago, she and her husband Eric were in Siberia to meet the sweet, dark-haired Rapunzel they desperately wanted. How they laughed at the nurses of Pokrovka Orphanage #2 with their garlic and their superstitions, and...

In a Perfect World is critically acclaimed writer Laura Kasischke's new novel of marriage, motherhood, and the choices we make when we have no choices left. Kasischke, the author of The Life Before Her Eyes, tells the story of Jiselle, a young flight attendant who's just settled into a fairy tale life with her new husband and stepchildren. But as a mysterious new illness spreads rapidly throughout the country, she begins to realize that her marriage,...

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...

I am sixteen when my mother steps out of her skin one frozen January afternoon-pure self, atoms twinkling like microscopic diamond chips around her perhaps the chiming of a clock, or a few bright flute notes in the distance-and disappears. No one sees her leave, but she is gone. When Katrina Connors' mother walks out on her family one frigid January day, Kat is surprised but not shocked, the whole year she has been "becoming sixteen"-falling in love...

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.

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...

Laura Kasischke's long-awaited selected poems presents the breadth of her probing vision that subverts the so-called "normal." A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke showcases her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family. As literary critic Stephen Burt wrote in Boston Review, The future will not see us by one poet alone. If...

Un pasteur promet à sa communauté de jeunes filles une vie éternelle, mais, un jour, on découvre qu'une jeune fille a été enterrée... Au printemps 1903, une communauté religieuse du Michigan éveille la curiosité avec ses maisons victoriennes, son verger luxuriant et son parc d'attractions ouvert à tous. Benjamin Purnell, le charismatique leader, promet la vie éternelle à ses adorateurs, en particulier aux belles jeunes filles. Comment...

A married motel receptionist in a bleak Michigan town, Leila Murray has slipped into the habit of trading sex with strangers for money. When she meets a drifter who alternately sweet-talks and physically abuses her, it might be the wakeup call that dissuades her from a life of prostitution. Instead, she allows him to become her pimp. In this chilling novel, we follow Leila's life as she spirals out of control-and learn the darkness in her past...