“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

​

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.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​

“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​

​

The Infinitesimals, Laura Kasischke’s ninth poetry collection, exhibits the same highly evocative and symbolic style that earned her Space, in Chains the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. Informed by illness and the deaths of loved ones, Kasischke’s new work embraces the living, sensual world with mysterious and lyrical imagery. The bodies in these poems remember their losses vividly, while the phantoms here know the physical world better than the living do. Kasischke’s poetry remains blatant and enigmatic, indelible and ephemeral, as it speaks of and to this world.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​

“A formally inventive work that speaks to the horrors and delights of ordinary life in an utterly original way.” —Judges’ citation, National Book Critics Circle Award

​

“Frightening in its confrontations with death—that of a father and, eventually, of everything—Kasischke’s new work is also ambitiously exhilarating: everything in life and literature, it seems, could come before her eye, could end up in a poem.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

​

​Laura Kasischke’s poems have the same haunting qualities and truth as our most potent memories and dreams. Through ghostly voices, fragmented narratives, overheard conversations, songs, and prayers in language reminiscent of medieval lyrics converted into contemporary idiom, the poems in Space, in Chains create a visceral strangeness true to their own music.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​

Laura Kasischke’s book of poetry, What It Wasn’t is a remarkable display of her talents as a poet and, more so, as a writer. She has mastered the ability to tell a story through poetry utilizing detailed imagery, metaphors and in-your-face visions.   —Goodreads
​

ORDER HERE >>

​

“My favorite book of poems by a contemporary author. Great work." Goodreads

​

This book of poetry was amazing. I borrowed it from the library, and I'm about to purchase it for my collection. It's a cacophony of images. "Murdered Girls" was my favorite. I am without words. Read it." - Goodreads

​​

FIND OUT MORE >>

​

“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

​

“This long-awaited selected volume presents the breadth of Kasischke’s probing and subversive vision, showcasing her command of the symbolic, with a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday.” —Publishers Weekly

​

In Where Now: New and Selected Poems, Kasischke, drawing upon her nine previous poetry collections, ventures to see through “the shameful, rubbery secret at the center of all of us.” Her poems may as readily settle on an image or an object and follow its story: mirrors, walls, and skin are entered into as the poet reveals their symbolic depths. In this essential volume, a stunning book-length selection of new work frames the retrospective.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​

This first collection of poems is an extraordinary book by an authentic young poet. Laura Kasischke's work is powerful in its vision, its memorable persona, its haunting music. The imaginative details in these poems throw the reader off-balance with their strange blend of savagery and sweetness, tragedy and joy.

 

Here is a poet who is able to evoke the mysteries of folklore and life both sadly and wisely, and to combine the ancient and the contemporary with an eerie intensity. The result is a brilliant book of poems full of dark and stunning images that cannot be comfortably forgotten.

​

FIND OUT MORE >>

“Kasischke’s world. . .is a world in which grace and horror, beauty and carnage, tragedy and hilarity commingle.”—Harvard Review

​

ORDER HERE >>

“… 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…” —Boston Review​

​

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.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​

The subject matter of these poems is ordinary: motherhood, marriage, sexuality, middle age, ambivalence, mortality, the Midwest. But in addressing these topics, Laura Kasischke finds and reveals the strangeness of the most common traditions and dilemmas. These are poems that work to fuse reality and dream, life and death, logic and illogic. Kasischke precisely renders the experience we have of ourselves as physical and time-bound beings existing in a psychological and spiritual realm that seems to have no barriers or laws. The poems in this collection are both narrative and lyric, grounded in reality but also surreal, at once fully realized and merely hinting at what might be.

​

FIND OUT MORE >>

​

“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

 

“Kasischke’s Gardening in the Dark proves as tortured as it is lovely—the kind of mixture only great poetry can offer.” —Review Revue

​

Gardening in the Dark, Kasischke’s sixth book of poetry, explores the transformative power of imagination. Her poems take us to the flip side of human consciousness, where anything can happen at any time. Tinged with surrealism, her work makes visionary leaps from the quotidian to sudden, surprising epiphanies.

​​

ORDER HERE >>

​