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.

“Kasischke handles earthly subjects adeptly even while making visionary leaps. [She] can recall James Wright, Randall Jarrell, or Jorie Graham, but she resembles none for long. Volatile, sometimes shocking, and seamless, her poems greet, tame, or confront the trials of puberty, medicine and marriage.... Balancing the quotidian with the estranging, fluent sentences with tumbling stanzas, and tenderness with anger, Kasischke shows as superb a feel for the bravura enjambments as for single details. Poems plummet into apparent melodrama, pull out of it, and then pull off (like stunt flyers)—maneuvers that depend on those perilous dives.”—Stephen Burt, Lingua Franca

"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. . . . 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."—Publishers Weekly