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Lilies Without
"She has, like all good poets, created a music of her own, one suited to her concerns. When denizens of the 22nd century, if we get there, look back on our era and ask how we lived, they will take an interest both in the strangest personalities who gave their concerns verbal form, and in the most representative. 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 “Kasichke’s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase.” — Austin American-Statesman Laura Kasischke in her own "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 loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction—congeniality. And then—Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen—all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given." Laura Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004) and Dance and Disappear (winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2007
1 person is currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Laura Kasischke
45 books408 followersLaura Kasischke is an American fiction writer and American poet with poetry awards and multiple well reviewed works of fiction. Her work has received the Juniper Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Prize, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes.
Her novel The Life Before Her Eyes is the basis for the film of the same name, directed by Vadim Perelman, and starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. Kasischke's work is particularly well-received in France, where she is widely read in translation. Her novel A moi pour toujours (Be Mine) was published by Christian Bourgois, and was a national best seller.
Kasischke attended the University of Michigan and Columbia University. She is also currently a Professor of English Language and of the Residential College at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.
Her novel The Life Before Her Eyes is the basis for the film of the same name, directed by Vadim Perelman, and starring Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood. Kasischke's work is particularly well-received in France, where she is widely read in translation. Her novel A moi pour toujours (Be Mine) was published by Christian Bourgois, and was a national best seller.
Kasischke attended the University of Michigan and Columbia University. She is also currently a Professor of English Language and of the Residential College at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 8, 2010
Laura Kasischke writes the kind of poems I like. At their best they are tight but supple and employ a diction that is fresh, surprising (without being pointlessly so) and skillfully employed to her purposes. My complaint is that despite this abundance of talent, Kasischke writes too much too fast and through over-production spoils her product. Her vita made me suspicious right off the bat. She is in her forties and Lilies Without is her seventh book of poetry. That’s a lot of books of poetry, but not atypical for establishment poets. But it represents a rate of production that far outpaces Bishop, Stevens, Eliot, and virtually any other great poet of the 20th century. This is late-period Robert Lowell or John Berryman levels of mass-production (and I do not mean this as a compliment). No poet, not even a genius, can crank out poems at this rate and not have a quality control problem.
Still, there is some fine, fine poetry in this book. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I think Kasischke discovered a secret that I though I alone possessed – that mid-period Sylvia Plath is grossly underrated and may even be, in fact, better than late-period Ariel Sylvia Plath. By mid-period Plath I mean those poems gathered together in a collection called Crossing the Water – these poems were written after the publication of her first book The Colossus and before her last brilliant Ariel phase. These mid-period poems were not published until after Ariel, so they make for an awkward chronological fit (sort of like the “last” Beatles’ album, er, Abbey Road or Let It Be?) and the book is somewhat lost in the glare of Ariel’s very real achievement. But poem for poem, I like Crossing the Water better than Ariel – the late poems too often are consumed in their own burning, leaving one with a handful of ashes and little sun-spots on the retina. I prefer the mud, blood and goo of Plath – so go right now and re-read Plath’s “Face Lift” and “Zoo Keeper’s Wife” if you think I am exaggerating mid-period Plath. She hadn’t pared herself down to the Ariel essentials yet, but had gotten under control her extravagant image-mongering from The Colossus…these poems karate chop the reader right in the neck. Ouch!
Kasischke karate chops pretty damned hard herself. To demonstrate her force (as well as the problem with Kasischke’s over-hurried production schedule) here is the opening of one of my favorites:
THE BAD TEACHER
She could come to the door in September for our son.
All thistled cursive and miscounted nickels. She
might tell him facts he’ll recall all his life:
Mice are spontaneously
generated by garbage.
The size of the skull is the size of the mind.
at the end of all this love
and fuss, we die. Everything
your mother told you about eternity was a lie.
I imagine her at night at a desk made for a child.
Her knees too high. Her elbows
rest on the floor. Switched
off for summer. And awful
doll. (I should have burned her as a girl, this has gone too far.)
Her spine and her eyes have been
sewn closed
by the same seamstress
who sewed this:
a black felt scrap of nightmare, its
edges stitched up sloppily to the stars.
This poem is better than fully 93% of the poems that get published in America these days. But it is incomplete, half-a-job’s worth, a good idea hastily built. Still, what a thrill: “ All thistled cursive and miscounted nickels” and those spontaneously generated mice. And the genuinely spooky image (if very Plathian) of the teacher sitting alone at night, crammed into that little desk, elbows resting on the floor. W. S. Merwin couldn’t put together something this vivid if you put 10,000 volts through him. But this poem is “stitched up sloppily” in many places. Why the long, stranded and unnecessary first line/stanza? For that matter, why most of the line/stanza breaks? There’s a randomness in the construction that puzzles me (and leads to my feeling this needed more time and tinkering). “Switched // off for summer…” is the only truly effective structural move in this excerpt. The italicized sections are a distraction. But I love the diction, exciting without being self-conscious or a strain. A missed opportunity, perhaps, but at least here is a real poem. Here is one of the later stanzas:
Enough of industry, enough
of goals and troubles, looking ahead, grooming, and dreaming
and anything that ended
in i-n-g in this
life ever again, she said.
This is a little jewel. This kicks ass. Hia-ya!
Kasischke does something I am surprised more poets don’t do – she has mini-series going on throughout the book. Not a big project like Berryman’s “Dream Songs” or Pound’s Cantos, but a handful of poems with the same conceit threading through the book – the “Miss” series (“Miss Congeniality,” “Miss January,” etc.) and three “New Dress” poems. This strategy (if I may call it a strategy) provides an easy (I don’t mean that pejoratively) way to give the reader a sense of continuity and allows the poet to explore a particular theme (for lack of a better word) without resorting to some tedious long poem. These poems anchor the book and deepen its impact.
Nevertheless, my praise must be curbed. Lilies Without could’ve been Kasischke’s Crossing the Water if she’d just hung on to it for another five or six years, honing and revising. Kasischke let’s too many things slide. Sylvia Plath (assuming my Plath-influence theory is correct) can lead to bad habits and bad poetry (Anne Sexton, please). Extravagant, passionate language can quickly lead to a verbal incontinence. And despite a massive talent, Kasischke nods far too often. What do pages 14, 16, 21, 22, 24, 49, 56, 61, 77, and 89 have in common? They all have the word “scream” on ‘em. That’s a lot of screaming in one small volume of poems. On page 22 this terrific image appears: “The debt birds screaming over the grave-/stone: ‘You owe! You owe!” On page 50 they don’t scream, they screech, but here they are again: “The Debt Birds screeching, Insufficient!” Truly, I love the debt birds (capitalized or not) but it was a little disheartening to encounter them twice. Not that there’s anything wrong with a poet repeating herself, but you don’t really want Wallace Stevens recycling a goodie such as “let be be finale of seem,” at least not in the same book.
Despite my reservations and disappointments, Laura Kasischke is one of the best things going in the Slough of Slop that is contemporary American poetry. I just wish they’d hurry up and give her tenure at the University of Michigan so she would slow the hell down with the book publishing.
Still, there is some fine, fine poetry in this book. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I think Kasischke discovered a secret that I though I alone possessed – that mid-period Sylvia Plath is grossly underrated and may even be, in fact, better than late-period Ariel Sylvia Plath. By mid-period Plath I mean those poems gathered together in a collection called Crossing the Water – these poems were written after the publication of her first book The Colossus and before her last brilliant Ariel phase. These mid-period poems were not published until after Ariel, so they make for an awkward chronological fit (sort of like the “last” Beatles’ album, er, Abbey Road or Let It Be?) and the book is somewhat lost in the glare of Ariel’s very real achievement. But poem for poem, I like Crossing the Water better than Ariel – the late poems too often are consumed in their own burning, leaving one with a handful of ashes and little sun-spots on the retina. I prefer the mud, blood and goo of Plath – so go right now and re-read Plath’s “Face Lift” and “Zoo Keeper’s Wife” if you think I am exaggerating mid-period Plath. She hadn’t pared herself down to the Ariel essentials yet, but had gotten under control her extravagant image-mongering from The Colossus…these poems karate chop the reader right in the neck. Ouch!
Kasischke karate chops pretty damned hard herself. To demonstrate her force (as well as the problem with Kasischke’s over-hurried production schedule) here is the opening of one of my favorites:
THE BAD TEACHER
She could come to the door in September for our son.
All thistled cursive and miscounted nickels. She
might tell him facts he’ll recall all his life:
Mice are spontaneously
generated by garbage.
The size of the skull is the size of the mind.
at the end of all this love
and fuss, we die. Everything
your mother told you about eternity was a lie.
I imagine her at night at a desk made for a child.
Her knees too high. Her elbows
rest on the floor. Switched
off for summer. And awful
doll. (I should have burned her as a girl, this has gone too far.)
Her spine and her eyes have been
sewn closed
by the same seamstress
who sewed this:
a black felt scrap of nightmare, its
edges stitched up sloppily to the stars.
This poem is better than fully 93% of the poems that get published in America these days. But it is incomplete, half-a-job’s worth, a good idea hastily built. Still, what a thrill: “ All thistled cursive and miscounted nickels” and those spontaneously generated mice. And the genuinely spooky image (if very Plathian) of the teacher sitting alone at night, crammed into that little desk, elbows resting on the floor. W. S. Merwin couldn’t put together something this vivid if you put 10,000 volts through him. But this poem is “stitched up sloppily” in many places. Why the long, stranded and unnecessary first line/stanza? For that matter, why most of the line/stanza breaks? There’s a randomness in the construction that puzzles me (and leads to my feeling this needed more time and tinkering). “Switched // off for summer…” is the only truly effective structural move in this excerpt. The italicized sections are a distraction. But I love the diction, exciting without being self-conscious or a strain. A missed opportunity, perhaps, but at least here is a real poem. Here is one of the later stanzas:
Enough of industry, enough
of goals and troubles, looking ahead, grooming, and dreaming
and anything that ended
in i-n-g in this
life ever again, she said.
This is a little jewel. This kicks ass. Hia-ya!
Kasischke does something I am surprised more poets don’t do – she has mini-series going on throughout the book. Not a big project like Berryman’s “Dream Songs” or Pound’s Cantos, but a handful of poems with the same conceit threading through the book – the “Miss” series (“Miss Congeniality,” “Miss January,” etc.) and three “New Dress” poems. This strategy (if I may call it a strategy) provides an easy (I don’t mean that pejoratively) way to give the reader a sense of continuity and allows the poet to explore a particular theme (for lack of a better word) without resorting to some tedious long poem. These poems anchor the book and deepen its impact.
Nevertheless, my praise must be curbed. Lilies Without could’ve been Kasischke’s Crossing the Water if she’d just hung on to it for another five or six years, honing and revising. Kasischke let’s too many things slide. Sylvia Plath (assuming my Plath-influence theory is correct) can lead to bad habits and bad poetry (Anne Sexton, please). Extravagant, passionate language can quickly lead to a verbal incontinence. And despite a massive talent, Kasischke nods far too often. What do pages 14, 16, 21, 22, 24, 49, 56, 61, 77, and 89 have in common? They all have the word “scream” on ‘em. That’s a lot of screaming in one small volume of poems. On page 22 this terrific image appears: “The debt birds screaming over the grave-/stone: ‘You owe! You owe!” On page 50 they don’t scream, they screech, but here they are again: “The Debt Birds screeching, Insufficient!” Truly, I love the debt birds (capitalized or not) but it was a little disheartening to encounter them twice. Not that there’s anything wrong with a poet repeating herself, but you don’t really want Wallace Stevens recycling a goodie such as “let be be finale of seem,” at least not in the same book.
Despite my reservations and disappointments, Laura Kasischke is one of the best things going in the Slough of Slop that is contemporary American poetry. I just wish they’d hurry up and give her tenure at the University of Michigan so she would slow the hell down with the book publishing.
October 24, 2017
MISS BREVITY
I made the gown myself from minutes
held together with safety pins, and
wore it as I wafted through the nursery,
pouring light all over the crowns
of their heads. All
those ghostly babies in their rows. O,
you swear you’ll remember us forever,
but you won’t.
I made the gown myself from minutes
held together with safety pins, and
wore it as I wafted through the nursery,
pouring light all over the crowns
of their heads. All
those ghostly babies in their rows. O,
you swear you’ll remember us forever,
but you won’t.
January 11, 2018
liminal, drifts between conversation and lyric, mundane and cosmic. sometimes unfocused as a collection but that doesn't really bother me. Warehouse of Prayers is a stand-out piece and well worth it. will be returning to it soon.
March 7, 2008
"I made the gown myself from minutes/ held together with safety pins..."
December 30, 2017
Left me on the edge of crying more times than I would like to admit.
December 8, 2020
I only liked one poem, a lot of the poems confused me so I couldn't connect with them. Others might enjoy this more than I did, but it left me feeling unsure of what I had read,
February 11, 2023
One of my favorite poetry books. "Tuesday" and "Hag" are BRILLIANT! I cry each time I read them.
December 14, 2011
Unless I’m misremembering, this is the book that Steven Burt really loved in Close Calls with Nonsense and that essay made me interested in Kasischke’s poetry. As far as that goes, I don’t think this is quite as good as Gardening at Night (less accessible, less focused in its themes or imagery) or Space In Chains (less intensely hermetic and immersive)—to me, there are lots of bits and bobs here, and most of them work, but it doesn’t feel like a whole book to me.
Notable things that are here: a series of “Miss” poems—“Miss Congeniality,” “Miss January,” “Miss Post-Apocalypse,” etc, which are fun self-portraits (I’m guessing here); a long sequence, in dialogue, that retells the Orpheus and Euridyce myth alongside prayer, or at least the wish to know how to pray; some poems about mom, some about dad (whose death haunts Space in Chains). Some other poems. I mean it when I say I liked a lot of this, but the lyrics here are dense, impacted, and elusive enough that regularly reinvesting myself into poems on such varied subjects was a little difficult—I found the book wearying, even when I read only one of the book’s sections—and that makes me think that maybe many of the poems here would read better individually, or in a selection of three as they likely first appeared, than as a book. Or is could be that I just don’t yet grasp the thread that connects them.
Notable things that are here: a series of “Miss” poems—“Miss Congeniality,” “Miss January,” “Miss Post-Apocalypse,” etc, which are fun self-portraits (I’m guessing here); a long sequence, in dialogue, that retells the Orpheus and Euridyce myth alongside prayer, or at least the wish to know how to pray; some poems about mom, some about dad (whose death haunts Space in Chains). Some other poems. I mean it when I say I liked a lot of this, but the lyrics here are dense, impacted, and elusive enough that regularly reinvesting myself into poems on such varied subjects was a little difficult—I found the book wearying, even when I read only one of the book’s sections—and that makes me think that maybe many of the poems here would read better individually, or in a selection of three as they likely first appeared, than as a book. Or is could be that I just don’t yet grasp the thread that connects them.
January 30, 2017
"To have been a storm in a suit of armor. (Or the hound//tied up outside/as the fox slipped quivering through the field.) To have been//fever in an envelope/mailed to a fire..." In this wildly imagined collection, the puzzles of time and identity play out in strange, deeply compelling collages of thought and memory, building up to Kasischke's very unique, personal magic.
April 6, 2011
Read this in a whirlwind. Great musical language, memorable images, surprising turns of phrase, and just as emotionally sad as it is funny. The longest poem, "Warehouse of Prayer," was especially exciting!
May 28, 2008
i read this pretty fast so i think when i re-read some of the poems it will grow on me more. she definitely uses some great imagery. The "Gettysburg" one is real good.
June 13, 2009
Maybe my favorite book by Laura Kasischke, which is saying a lot! "Miss Congeniality" is stunning and (hint) can be read online at Amazon if you want a sneak preview of the book.
August 7, 2011
Super duper suburban poetry
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews