Lightning Falls in Love

by Laura Kasischke

Overview

Starred Review in Publishers Weekly: "Magic and survival are at the center of Kasischke’s marvelous 12th poetry collection... This book is a triumph of storytelling by a master of craft."

In her stunning twelfth poetry collection, Lightning Falls in Love, Laura Kasischke makes magic with a complex alchemy of nostalgia and fire, birdwing and sorrow. In new poems that search the murky lake for news of the past, she evokes unsayable trauma and gleans possibility. This is poetry that is existential in scope but grounded in the body, surreal yet suburban, reaching for clarity just beyond the fog of the day-to-day. Kasischke has found an entirely new way to spin beauty and pull breath from that which must be dredged up and revived before it can be left behind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556596360
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and currently living in Chelsea, Michigan with her family, Laura Kasischke has written eleven collections of poetry and seven novels, among them Space, in Chains, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan.

Read an Excerpt

1.
Perhaps

this is what it feels like to be a woman who is also a vulture. To be

a vulture who is a woman with a broken wing.

To have been cared for by a mother.
To have hatched.
To have been featherless

as a girl. To have been fed the death of someone else by a mother in a nest. And then

to have grown feathers. To have been sent out on her own. Not

to have wanted to go.
But to have flown.

To have already known

the scent so well she could smell it as herself.

3.
My silk scar

I mean my silk
scarf—although
I wore no scarf.
It was summer behind the indoor high school swimming pool on the other side of the parking lot.

He knocked me off my bike. (I don’t remember this, but it was in the paperwork, which I kept for decades in a folder in a closet until
I asked my husband to burn it for me, and I know he did because I watched him from the kitchen window and saw the ashes on the sleeves of his jacket when he came back in.)

The frame was bent.
My bike.
A Schwinn.
Emerald green.
I think I had a towel in a basket between its handle bars.

He knocked me off.
The frame was bent.
(I don’t remember this.)
A neighbor fixed it for me, but if
I ever saw that bike again, I also don’t remember this. But I do remember my father, how we’d hear him in the bathroom after that and how it sounded as if he wept for all the world-without-him-in-it, which one day the world would be: he loved me so.

And my mother woke me up to tell me it was time for swimming lessons again.
Yes, I got raped, but, I
still had to learn how to swim.

I could show you where it happened, but what I wish —


(stanza break)



what I wish is I could let you see the light that day the way I did:
that light lasted only half an hour or so, I suppose, but afterward it lasted my whole life. Whenever
I want to see it I just close my eyes, and then it pours all over me

in tubs and buckets and trunks of light emptied all at once all over what was just (in my case) some eleven-year old girl who’d stumbled into a convenience store where a boy I never saw before or again left the register, locked the door, told me to sit down on the floor while he called—

I don’t remember this, but I remember (will. not forget) that he asked me what my favorite flavor was before he got me some-
thing cold to drink, for free—with a straw, because it was broken, my jaw, which
I remember now and then when I bite into an apple or open my mouth too wide to yawn. Now, just

that flavor is a secret I’ll never tell anyone again. What it was. What it still is. It’s sacred, that secret and what I tasted then, behind the locked door of the convenience store, on the other side of the high school’s indoor swimming pool across from the parking lot where he told me to shut up, and I still (I don’t know why) didn’t.

I asked if I was dead or going to die.
“No,” the boy said. “It’s not deep, the cut, but you’ll need stitches.”

And he was right, unlike my rapist, who told me he was killing me, and then that I was dying while he cut me with his little knife—superficially—a word
I doubt I knew the definition of back then, but which
I’ve grown to know the meaning of a little better every year I go on living. This

death of mine, it took a doctor only seven stitches to sew it

(stanza break)


into me again. And with such precision! Now
I have only this silk scar.
My rapist

never touched my scarf because I wore no scarf.
My rapist raped me, and he didn’t get away with it.


Excerpt from 4.
She asked me, “Did you cry then?”

when I cut that onion—all its vulnerability, and nakedness, and the silence with which it allowed itself to be sliced into slivery ribbons, so easily separated from, and collapsing away from the center to which it had been mindlessly and comfortably attached since the beginning, and then

its pale, watery juice, how it pooled around the halved bulb of it, which had begun in winter, in the darkness, underground, in a garden—expanding, gradually, into rings, and into ringlets, and how these grew larger and wider as they labored to hide the sentiment at the center of it, until

they were a singularity, finally, until the whole of it was veiled, and vague, made ambiguous by a parchment gown, that bit of modesty the world had left to it, like the papery thing a gynecologist might drape over your spread legs before peering into the secrets hidden between them. Its

not for nothing, that little comfort, offered—which you must accept when you are offered it—meant

to help you feel cared for, so that you might imagine yourself shielded while you wait to be yanked out of the earth by your hair



and then your singularity, cut in half, and then in half again, and then in half again, and then—the tears, the paper gown fallen on the floor, the knife
I held, pressed into myself, she asked me, “Did you cry then?”

“No,” I said.

“No tears at all?” —until nothing was left, until the nothingness was what was left, and we were happy to have it, and we both knew was it was for, and we knew it was the reason for everything else and always had been—
the high heels, the make-up, the pantyhose, the poems—

Table of Contents

The vine 3

1 (are gone)

Perhaps 7

The eavesdropper (or what I thought I heard my mother talking about on the phone, in another room, thirty-six years ago) 8

The rime machine 10

Two canoes 13

The interview 14

Eleven girls 18

When a bolt of lightning falls in love 21

Storm 22

My silk scar 24

Secrets 28

The house sitter 30

2 (have burned)

She asked me, "Did you cry then?" 39

True Crime (1) 42

Blindside 43

Red Mud Lake (1) 45

An evil meal 47

To speak 48

Neighbor (1) 51

No elegy 55

The Nostalgia for Infinity 57

My first mistress 60

3 (will burn)

For the return of the bee 63

Red Mud Lake (2) 65

Neighbor (2) 67

Moon Landing 69

A Girl's Guide to Color 70

Talisman 75

Two gardens 76

Suffering song 77

For a few minutes, once 78

Nine trials 79

Rescue Annie 80

Snapshots, last picnic 81

Bomb angel 82

4 (have flown)

The beautiful hand 87

Facts 88

True Crime (2) 91

The odyssey 92

A doll's house 97

It's not contagious 98

CINDY2 99

The Pelican 102

Red Mud Lake (3) 104

Gargoyle 105

Red Mud Lake (4) 109

On the nature of things 111

Everyone together at the lake 113

Paint 116

I hear 117

Prayer 119

Acknowledgments 121

About the Author 123

Editorial Reviews

For Kasischke and for Glück both, poetry is a kind of revenge on the existential limits that it describes”—Stephanie Burt, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Maybe it doesn’t take a visionary to merge a funeral with Deep Purple, or to combine realism with myth, but this poet is deeply smart in a way that isn’t often articulated in the world and her fusions and images can add up to revelation.” —The Brooklyn Rail

“This is a collection of masterful poems that are honest about the experience of being a person while posing urgent philosophical questions and answering them through the act of art that chimes and throws sparks.” —Jennifer Michael Hecht, American Poets

“Kasischke’s latest collection, tight with her distinguishing concision and strong lyricism, continues to invent and explore new terrains.” —Ploughshares

“Kasischke astonishes with her lyricism and metaphorical power.” —Publishers Weekly

“Kasischke’s poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase.”—Austin American-Statesman

“Every poem is exquisitely crafted, with crisp, clean lines and imagery that dazzles.”— The Washington Post

“Kasischke is an expert of perspectives. She exercises precise control over where to look, while reminding you that you are also being watched.”—Rain Taxi

From the Publisher