As Is: Poems

by Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Overview

As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822967026
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	01/17/2023
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of Sleeping Preacher, Eve’s Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.

Read an Excerpt

FRESHET 

 

Born when the mountain rushes 

with sudden, small streams, 

 

when coltsfoot shoves its hooves— 

thick-stemmed, fringed suns— 

 

up through dead leaves,  

and the sumac’s maroon torches  

 

 finally fade, Love, leave  

your desk, come to the woods 

 

where all is urge and bird-flurry 

yearning toward sky. 

 

Table of Contents

They Call It a Strip Job 5

Sweetgum 7

Testing 9

City of the Dead 11

War 12

What the Hemlock Said 14

Climate Change with Daughter and Tomatoes 15

Gideons 17

American Bittersweet 20

At Cross Creek Park 22

Eastern Box Turtle 24

American Chestnut Plantation 25

As Is 27

Precious Memories Help Yourself 33

Hand Me Down 35

Flags 36

When I Say Is That What You're Wearing? 37

When I Say Make a List 38

When I Say Clean Your Room 39

When I Say Okay, Take My Car 40

When I Say It's Your Life 41

Waking Up with Jerry Sandusky 42

Second Space 44

Bruder 46

Short Story 48

Valentine with Domestic Life 50

Adrift 51

Lake Trail, January 52

Dialogue with Lake Perez 54

Lit 59

They Call Them Desire Lines 60

Viking Ribstones, Alberta 61

Amaryllis 62

Freshet 63

Goats 64

Helpmate 65

October Snow 67

Luck 69

Home Farm 71

August Friday, Adirondacks 74

Gulls 75

Outer Banks Epithalamium 77

Meditation at Panama City Beach, Florida 78

Unnamed Tributary 82

Notes 85

Acknowledgments 89

Editorial Reviews

Kasdorf has encountered her social and religious paradoxes with honesty and perspicacity.

Belt Magazine

Julia Kasdorf, thankfully, collects poems in As Is, not as a project but has an array of well-wrought individual poems. Even so, the titles of poems offer a focus on subjects such as labor and laborers, daughter as self and parent, nature as awe-inspiring as well as a sphere damaged. These poems play out with a covert lyricism (turtle/mill/initial/shell; root splay/crayfish; Castle/mussels) that echoes throughout. After all, what captivates me most is how trauma can appear so mundane: dread of walking in a particular area, raising a child, the workers’ lot. Entering her poems is entering a door open for fervent discovery and calm.

Kimiko Hahn

In As Is, Julia Spicher Kasdorf brings her generous, searching vision to the frayed beauty of spaces between the urban and the rural. Her poems bear witness to rough, hardscrabble places, the labor of those who live there, and histories on the verge of dissolving in a rapidly changing environment. These are poems of transition, formed by the friction of weeds pushing up against stone, the stubborn wildness of goats gnawing at fences, and the exertions of those who must reckon with the loss of cherished landscapes and roles. As the ground shifts, the poet draws our attention to the inimitable, shining, and vulnerable marvel of what is.

Sofia Samatar

With deep humility and earned authority, Julia Kasdorf can enter an achingly transitory situation, a landscape we take for granted, and connect us to the arc of history. Her poems embrace embodiment and the moment, then take a step back and suggest our era, forces beyond psychology, forces too close to see. Kasdorf is an exemplary poet of witness. Her visceral lines never exhort, but they take full responsibility for everything they touch. They make no claim on transcendence, but they are on fire for redemption. As Is is extraordinary.

D. Nurkse

"Kasdorf has encountered her social and religious paradoxes with honesty and perspicacity."
—Belt Magazine

“In As Is, Julia Spicher Kasdorf brings her generous, searching vision to the frayed beauty of spaces between the urban and the rural. Her poems bear witness to rough, hardscrabble places, the labor of those who live there, and histories on the verge of dissolving in a rapidly changing environment. These are poems of transition, formed by the friction of weeds pushing up against stone, the stubborn wildness of goats gnawing at fences, and the exertions of those who must reckon with the loss of cherished landscapes and roles. As the ground shifts, the poet draws our attention to the inimitable, shining, and vulnerable marvel of what is.”—Sofia Samatar, author of The White Mosque: A Memoir 

“With deep humility and earned authority, Julia Kasdorf can enter an achingly transitory situation, a landscape we take for granted, and connect us to the arc of history. Her poems embrace embodiment and the moment, then take a step back and suggest our era, forces beyond psychology, forces too close to see. Kasdorf is an exemplary poet of witness. Her visceral lines never exhort, but they take full responsibility for everything they touch. They make no claim on transcendence, but they are on fire for redemption. As Is is extraordinary.” —D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems 

“Julia Kasdorf, thankfully, collects poems in As Is, not as a project but has an array of well-wrought individual poems. Even so, the titles of poems offer a focus on subjects such as labor and laborers, daughter as self and parent, nature as awe-inspiring as well as a sphere damaged. These poems play out with a covert lyricism (turtle/mill/initial/shell; root splay/crayfish; Castle/mussels) that echoes throughout. After all, what captivates me most is how trauma can appear so mundane: dread of walking in a particular area, raising a child, the workers’ lot. Entering her poems is entering a door open for fervent discovery and calm.”—Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

From the Publisher