Dance and Disappear

by Laura Kasischke

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.

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Paperback

First published June 20, 2002

About the author

Laura 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.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Laura Kasischke has written one of the most pure and beautiful poems ever. Nothing I can say can better explain this collection than her stirring words here:

Please

Stay in this world with me.

There go the ships.
The little buses.
The sanctity, the subway.
But let us stay.

Every world has pain, I knew it when I brought you

to this one. It's true-the rain is never stopped by the children's parade. Still

I tell you, it weakens you after a while into love.

The plastic cow, the plastic barn,
The fat yellow pencil, the smell of paste.

Oh, I knew it wasn't perfect all along.
Its tears and gravities.
Its spaces and caves.
As I know it again today

crossing the street your hand in mine
heads bowed in a driving rain.

I love this poem to tears. It’s the sort of thing poetry exists to express. The sadness of life mixed with the tenderness, the ineffability of a comforting thought swelling the heart amidst the acknowledgement of impermanence and violent chaos. It’s why we write, it’s why we read. ‘It doesn’t matter because / we’re helpless in the hands of what does,’ Kasischke writes in Dance and Disappear. It’s a collection that makes one believe poetry to be one of those hands holding us over the abyss.

Spontaneous Human Combustion:
"Girl, Kissing, Bursts into Flames"

It happened to me. I was there. Out

past the factory, where

whole pleasure could be pried
open with an impulse and a wrench. The strange

cowboy of him, chains
and leather and mascara.
I was a keychain, some patchy fog.
The noise of the neural system seemed
to be coming from the stars.

Oh, the wren brought those kisses down from heaven.
A screech owl brought them up from hell.
O earth, wind, water, this

is a simile not satisfied by fire -

Still, if he'd doused me in kerosene that night
I could not have burned better or brighter.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding poet with remarkable breadth and depth. She takes you places you've never been before and prods you to think beyond what you've thought before. I know of no finer poem than "Bike Ride with Older Boys." We know the dangers of daring, which this poem chillingly confronts, but we now see in a new way the dangers of prudence, which can cause you to miss "perhaps...the best afternoon of my life."

[Grace Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

actually incredible. turns in poems are amazing, slant rhyme takes me by surprise each time, yet feels like a backwards glance from Kasischke. Teach me your ways!!

“It doesn’t matter because/ we’re helpless in the hands of what does.”

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creative, accessible, honest, Laura Kasischke transforms cupboards in a kitchen or a routine geyser spray at Yellowstone into colorful, poetic language. Her words breathe with a living honesty as if she were speaking across the table to you. Some of her poems carry dark themes, referring to death or childhood hurt, and some of beautiful memories. When reading a collection like this, I usually try to determine for myself the strongest poem, but in this case there are too many. Each one is my favorite.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Kasischke is stunning in her ability to start at one place, often in the seemingly ordinary or mundane and explode like cosmic matter hurled in all sorts of directions. I am consistently amazed by this feat, as it's risky, yet Kasischke pulls it off, movingly, time and time again.

[Carolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprising use of language & metaphors... Very unique voice.
Sometimes difficult to understand, but that does not take away anything from the poems...
Very different from "Space, in Chains"... which I prefer.

[Amanda Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some amazing turns of language and a few images that absolutely caught my breath.