kirsten kaschock
Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
An ex-chemist returns to her family farm. There, she breeds a crow the size of a horse. Things do not go as planned.
Winner of the 2025 Juniper Literary Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press and UMass Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers.
Coming in March 2026.
“Impossibly lyric and ambitious, an Iliad of parenting, of ambivalence, self-sacrifice and care. A divorce-poem and a tale of scientific obsession - tragic, feminist and sublime as Shelley’s Frankenstein, but quick-paced, wry, and gorgeous for the 21st century.”
Bruce and Mina left in winter. This spring came and went like a sad song. It’s almost September. I’ve been spending a good deal of time alone with the crow. It’s been a summer of Solo. Solo and summer and me, the barn like an oven. Me and my black bird baked in a pie.
Solo hot. He says.
Yes, I say.
I have, of late, been finding it advisable to respond to my experiment.
““…Kaschock’s gestures are contemporary, jagged, and stop-start, wonderfully torqued and rippling with unexpected flights, breaks, and drops.” ”
DEFINED
To manufacture hunger I need
time and a stick and at the end
dangling like a fish from thread—
carrot. And the carrot withered
with a bitter beard. Hunger has come
when I would with the stick beat
my babysister for half that old man
carrot. The other half, the stick,
the thread, my own hand holding
its famine-machine a foot beyond
the other one: these bits I call art.
—I quit because I was good, and when you’re good and a girl at something, you should be suspicious.
—Of what?
—Of what part of yourself you didn’t know you were selling.
““It’s increasingly rare for any book to really surprise you. Sleight does more: it astonishes. A rigorous, unsentimental, strange and beautiful work.” ”
