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An Impossibility of Crows

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.
— Jordy Rosenberg
 

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.”
— Carolyne Wright
 
 

Explain This Corpse

 

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.

 

 
 

Sleight

—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.”
— China Miéville