What It Wasn't [Paperback]

Laura Kasischke (Author)

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.

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr (March 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887482740
• ISBN-13: 978-0887482748
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,891,879 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

4.0 out of 5 stars Poetic primal screams, September 7, 2002

By 

Michael J. Mazza - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: What It Wasn't (Paperback)

I was really impressed by "What It Wasn't," the poetry collection by Laura Kasischke. The author has a vivid literary voice. Her poems are often nightmarish, sensual, and/or surreal; the book is full of bizarre, unsettling imagery. Her preoccupation with death is reminiscent of the work of Poe.

Here are some samples of her vision. "The moon tonight is red as something / too sweet and full of female screams to eat" (from "Andy's Lanes & Lounge"). "How skinny the Cornish hen / appears in the oven. / A plucked, baked, feminine / fist" (from "Woman in a Girdle"). In another poem she describes the moon as "a blind blue infant face" ("My Heart"). Also remarkable is the title poem, which recalls a paranormal encounter with a fantastic bird. Although I didn't always find the poems totally coherent, Kasischke's voice is consistently compelling, and this book is definitely worth reading.