a beautiful name for a girl

by Kirsten Kaschock

Poetry. Human identity testing are the speakers of these poems mother, teacher, creative artist--or are they merely bones to be sorted and juggled? The ramifications of identity ("we'd know... the translation / into mother to be exaltation. Murder, also") leap up sharply in the book's central poem, "Snuff Ballet," in which one speaker, a dancer, is tested by inquisitors who may be a board from whom she seeks a grant. But perhaps these voices, which quickly become intimate and judgmental ("When was the last time you had sex?"), are merely criticism internalized, part of the "one-woman show."

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2011

About the author

Award winning author Kirsten Kaschock is a poet and novelist who writes across genres. Her background in dance has impacted her work—she consistently addresses intersections between language and body. The author of seven poetry books, she has received fellowships from the Pew Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Subcircle, and the Summer Literary Seminars. Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. She has lived in Iowa, New York, Georgia, and Maryland—and currently resides in Northeast Pennsylvania with her partner. Her work has been called “gothic and intense,” “as fascinating as it is disturbing,” and “inventive and exhilarating.” As Cheryl Strayed once noted: “There isn’t anyone like any single one of us, but the way there is no one like Kirsten Kaschock is a different thing.”

Reviews

[Sian Griffiths]

Kaschock is always brilliant. Her novel SLEIGHT is one of my favorite books in the past decade. Her first poetry collection UNFATHOMS shows the talent that this second collection confirms and that lead her forthcoming collection to win the AWP poetry prize. In all her work, Kaschock handles searingly painful topics, not with tongs, but bare-handed. Like Plath, she confronts the difficult and conflicted feelings associated with being a woman and a mother that popular culture often asks us to submerge. Like Plath, there are bees here. Kaschock's style, though, is altogether different. I want to say the poems are intensely fragmented, but I wasn't thinking of fragments when I read it; I was thinking of fractals and of the way one thing can spin off into another and another and we're left staring dazzled at the beautiful remains.

A few favorite poems: Eight Rooms In, She Will Not Say It's Personal and She Will It's Over, Writing Spider (For Bourgeois), Marriage (2), Kept: A Thimbleful of Ache, The 18 Gates of Sage.

A sample:

Marriage (2)

In the bent city
we tip over from too much standing.
You stand for father.
I attempt to stand-in for the protagonist
who's gone into hiding.
We've wrapped our arms around the dead
like a rug to carry to the dumpster.
We're that kind and the dead are up too many flights.
You jimmy locks while I offer readings
and we make just enough
to pretend.
On weekdays bills knock about
the insides of walls we don't own.
We don't pay
and the dead get louder.
Sometimes there are children across the street in the lot.
You throw bottles down at the asphalt
and talk about the colors.
Really, you want them to cut each other up--
so I won't want one.
That night, we ask each other whose turn it is in bed.
You say the hungrier one should cook
so I cook.
The dead make everything taste like caraway.
When I spit into the sink there is blood and this
is the beginning of what you can't give.
You are much older than I am.
I am young enough to hate the dead.