Dance and Disappear (Juniper Prize for Poetry) [Paperback]

Laura Kasischke (Author)

Book Description

Series: Juniper Prize for Poetry | Publication Date: June 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Kasischke's fourth and fifth collections return to accustomed themes frustrated domesticity, nostalgia, motherhood, marriage leaping from personal anecdote to fairy tale to biblical or Greco-Roman myth with astonishing speed and no small dose of melodrama. At times reminiscent of Sexton, but without the bravura, Kasischke's women are often ghostly, haunted and haunting: "That girl over there, she's/ pale an exhalation a girl/ you pass through like Nebraska/ on a white-washed day." The poems often glide on wry asides ("Who can tell the difference between the state/ of grace and the state of inebriation?") or alight on prosey detail: "Once, lying naked/ beside my husband in a sweaty/ bed, an awful/ moth flew through the window/ and landed on my breast." As with Kasischke's strongest collection, Fire & Flower, these two books reveal a troubled relationship between a speaker and her body: a thwarted sexuality, an obsession with food and alcohol, a longing for physical transformation. Myth and magic (including full-blown Ovidian metamorphosis) can sometimes rescue a poem from self-pity, but can also catapult it toward the ridiculous, as when a dead bird carries a "message" in a poem about trying to quit smoking, or when a friend's drunken mother is remembered as having "poled/ us to morning on a ferry, dark/ and slow against the current, ghost-/ white and floating/ up the Nile all night...." While the poems of Dance succeed more often, the two collections are quite similar in tone, subject matter and associative structure. (June) Forecast: Kasischke teaches at Western Michigan University and has published three novels, mostly recently The Life Before Her Eyes from Harcourt. Warm reviews of the novel have stressed Kasischke's poetic language and explicitly mentioned her poetry; shelving these collections next to it should boost sales significantly.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Laura Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps." -- Stephen Burt,

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Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558493522
• ISBN-13: 978-1558493520
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,220,871 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Kasischke teaches in the University of Michigan MFA program and the Residential College. She has published seven collections of poetry and seven novels. She lives with her family in Chelsea, Michigan.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Interesting Poet in America, September 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Dance and Disappear (Juniper Prize for Poetry) (Paperback)

Some might accuse Kasischke of being a poet's poet, but maybe the problem is that the world of poetry readers hasn't quite caught up with what she's doing yet, but the poets themselves have begun to catch on. The moments of brilliance and transcendence illuminate these pages, but are held together with an eerie music and a quick wit. Laura Kasischke is one of the most interesting poets to come along in decades, and this is her most interesting book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Burning up the pages, February 2, 2003

By 

Joel Van Valin "the whistler" (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dance and Disappear (Juniper Prize for Poetry) (Paperback)

Laura Kasischke is reigning master of the half-said, and in Dance and Disappear, her fourth book of poetry, she delights once again with her vivid imagery and transient style, a heady mixture of the lyrical and macabre. The poems often change course so swiftly that even an astute reader can lose the thread - only to reemerge, two stanzas later, from out of the blue. "Day", for example, shifts at light speed from lost keys to a sparrows nest to a hat her husband wore in the jungle, the only link being the different days of the week on which she notices them. Until we get to Saturday, when:

the library's stone lions run
freely through the streets

And at this very height of madness, suddenly, somehow it all makes sense. You get the excited feeling that black magic is being performed in front of you, and read the poem several more times, compulsively, until you can make your peace with it.

Dance and Disappear has the feel of a transitional work, with themes from Kasischke's previous two books, Housekeeping in a Dream and Fire & Flower, reemerging along with a few hints of what we might expect in the future. Housekeeping's fascination with youth, death and sex surfaces again here in poems like "Spontaneous Human Combustion" and "Bike Ride with Older Boys". The poems have the trick of setting ordinary details at an unsettling angle, such as these lines from "Black Car":

Once, a black car pulled
into my driveway
and pulled back out.

That afternoon, the sun
was an eye on fire
in the sky.
But it had its headlights on.

Fire & Flower revolved mainly around motherhood, and there are several poems here in that vein as well - "My Son in the Cereal Isle", for example, where the narrator loses her child (briefly) in a grocery store. A few poems fuse the two themes, and step beyond them into the the realm of philosophy. "Back of the North Wind", for instance describes an imaginary place of perfect weather where people are nonetheless sad:

... Only
one drunken bus driver
has ever gone and come back.

Rather than seeming cryptic or evasive, the poem seems to be trying very hard to tell us something that could not be conveyed in any other words.

Kasischke's style is not particularly original - Baudelaire was describing carrion in the road a hundred years ago, and Robet Lowell was writing with autobiographical intimacy in the 1950's. What sets Kasischke apart is her imagination, the intuitive way she arranges her brief images like picture stills to give us a glimpse clarity so pure that it seems almost madness.

The title of the book, as Kasischke explains in "The Visibility of Spirits", comes from a Bisquick Box: "The skillet is ready when a few drops of water sprinkled on it dance and disappear". The same applies this collection of poems. Some refuse to ignite. Others are interesting but so cryptic you want to get the poet's number, call her up in the middle of the night and ask "So, Laura, what was THAT all about?" But a good many do actually dance and one or two may even disappear, in that act of black magic mentioned above. Just remember to heed Kasischke's own warning:

If one becomes accustomed
to sensational detail
she loses her taste for ordinary things.