The Infinitesimals
3.5/5
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About this ebook
"Kasischke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imagery and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase."—Austin American-Statesman
The Infinitesimals stares directly at illness and death, employing the same highly evocative and symbolic style that earned Laura Kasischke the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. Drawing upon her own experiences with cancer, and the lives and deaths of loved ones, Kasischke's new work commands a lyrical and dark intensity.
Laura Kasischke is the author of eight collections of poetry and seven novels. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Laura Kasischke
Laura Kasischke teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, she has published eight collections of poetry and ten novels, three of which have been made into films, including The Life Before Her Eyes.
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Reviews for The Infinitesimals
2 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This collection contains domestic poetry that is at once brusque, argumentative, and beautiful. She is a poet of particulars, which are familiar and yet just subtly off true (infinitesimally unexpected) in a way that gives pause and reflection:
A familiar sweater in a garbage can
A surgeon bent over our baby, wearing a mask
Highly recommended.
Book preview
The Infinitesimals - Laura Kasischke
ONE
Outside Are the Dogs and the Sorcerers
You’ve Come Back to Me
for G
A small thing crawling toward me
across this dark lawn. Bright
eyes the only thing I’m sure I see.
You’ve come back to me,
haven’t you, my sweet? From
long ago, and very far. Through
crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve
come back to me, have you? Even
smaller this time than the stars.
The Two Witnesses
When I saw your body in the world
I knew exactly who you were, and I
stared at you
as you stared at me, both
of us crawling in through the other’s
eyes, depositing, then
leaving.
You were the one in the bed
getting ready to leave—incurable
woman like a broken
wing
tucked beneath
a sheet.
I was the volunteer girl
for a few hours the
day you died.
You were the woman I would be.
I was the girl you were.
And then
seated at the train window:
Landscape.
Damp faces.
Both of us witness
to everything.
Who
Who are these elders
in their white robes? These
females and males? These
royals and ruled? Who
are these children? This woman beside me? This
magician, this priest, this meat in this soup, this
utter conundrum—what
is it, and where did it come from?
O Kepler, O Newton, O Darwin, O Driesch.
What machinery all night, and all day
what dream?
And where is my father? I asked and I asked—but I
was no more than the windmill asking
questions of its own
shadow on the grass.
He was never here, they told me. Your
father is not in his bed and not in his grave. No one
has ever lived here
who answered to your father’s name.
I insisted. I begged. I tore my hair. They
gave me sad expressions, then
tea, then pills, then
exasperation. We’re
sorry, but you’re
terribly mistaken.
But, having come to visit my father, I
knelt down in the desert and parted the sands
to search for the path on my knees and hands.
I drank from the mirage
of the pond for an answer until,
finally, the water lilies asked me:
Who was your father?
as they floated there
all girlish laughter and waxen hands, making
and remaking themselves without fathers
out of water and air.
In This Order
A tail, a torso, a tiny face.
A longing, a journey, a deep belief.
A spawning, a fissioning, a bit of tissue
anchored to a psyche,
stitched to a wish.
Watery. Irony. Memory. My
mother, my face, and then
the last thing
she’d ever see, and then
the last words
I’d hear her say: You’re
killing me.
Hurry
You cannot cross this border
without your name. Think
harder, the stone says
as it slips into the milk, that
great pale vat out of which
my mother selected
the sound of it
from the same silence
that surrounds me now.
Pen in hand. Marble statue
standing at the center
of the great museum
whispering, whispering, without
needing to move her lips:
Listen.
I try, but I
can’t hear it.
Hurry.
The old man
with tears in his eyes
watches his old brother hobble
to the men’s room at McDonald’s.
Mushrooms
Like silent naked monks huddled
around an old tree stump, having
spun themselves in the night
out of thought and nothingness—
And God so pleased with their