Fire & Flower
Laura Kasischke
1998 Beatrice Hawley Award
"Kasischke's world ... is a world in which grace and horror, beauty and carnage,
tragedy and hilarity commingle." "Kasischke peels back the blander surfaces of the quotidian as if to find the
unconscious realm just beneath the Formica." "Kasischke's breathless and disjunctive rhetoric becomes the stuff of a frightened
and exhuberant 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." Author photo by Patrick Adams
—Harvard Review
—The Antioch Review
—Bruce Bond
about the author
Laura Kasischke is the author of several collections of poems, including Wild
Brides (New York University Press, 1992) and Housekeeping in a
Dream (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995) and the novels Suspicious
River and White Bird in a
Blizzard. Her most recent books include a collection of poetry, Dance and Disappear (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), winner of the 2001 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and the novel, The Life Before Her Eyes (Harcourt, 2002). She attended the University of Michigan
and Columbia University. She is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for
the Arts, The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the
Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan and teaches at Washtenaw
Community College.
