Fire & Flower

By Laura Kasischke

Book Overview

"Kasischke's world. . .is a world in which grace and horror, beauty and carnage, tragedy and hilarity commingle."

-Harvard Review

"Kasischke peels back the blander surfaces of the quotidian as if to find the unconscious realm just beneath the Formica."

-The Antioch Review

"Kasischke's breathless and disjunctive rhetoric becomes the stuff of a frightened and exuberant intelligence, sometimes rapturous, sometimes crazed, but more often than not deceptively canny in its ostensible abandon, its sentence fractures and strange pairings ... The result is a book both personal and ambitious in scope, full of the startling sympathies, little horrors, and always the irrepressible compulsion toward beauty."

-Bruce Bond

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1882295218
• ISBN13: 9781882295210
• Release Date: December 1998
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Length: 82 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

An Astonishing Voice

Laura Kasischke's writing, in both her poems and her novels, is brilliantly original. She handles difficult subject matter with unblinking honesty, but doesn't ignore the power of ironic humor. There is a real person behind these poems, and I feel lucky to have finally found a poet/writer whose work I never tire of. You know that record you've played over and over and still haven't grown tired of, the songs that sound fresh every time like the first time? That's how this writer works for me.

A Strange and Beautiful Book of Poems

This is a strange and beautiful book of poems. Laura Kasischke writes vividly, but the poems are also creepy and mysterious. I've had the honor of taking her class at Washtenaw Community College twice now, and I have to say she is one of the funniest, nicest ladies I've ever met. Where she finds these frightening images and subjects beats the heck out of me, but that just adds to the mystery, and makes me love these poems even more.