Laura Kasischke is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Dance and Disappear, recipient of the Juniper Award in 2002, and Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received many other honors as well, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. Her novels include The Life before Her Eyes, which was adapted for film, and The Raising (2011). A professor of English at the University of Michigan, Kasischke lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.


2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry


Four Poems

by Laura Kasischke

Atoms on Loan

        for Bill

The eyelid of a stone in my hand

flutters, and then it opens. I say, Hello?


For a moment, I was a woman with her son standing under an arch made of ancient rocks in Scotland. (You took the photo.)


For an hour in 1981 I was a girl with drunken hair in a
swaying tower.


For a month or two in my twenties I paddled a boat made of lead down a river of blood with my hands.
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