Lightning Falls in Love

Magic and survival are at the center of Kasischke’s marvelous 12th poetry collection. A master of the symbolic, Kasischke (Where Now) evokes shadowy figures and totems: a tongue “as white as a strip of paper” in a glass jar; “a stranger [...] wearing high black boots in the rose garden;” “a bird that makes its nest/ in the highest towers/ of the children’s hospital/ out of the softest/ children’s hair.” But these poems are set in reality—on highways, in kitchens, backyards, and bedrooms—and many recall trauma plainly, without the protections of allegory: “My mother woke me up/ to tell me it was time for swimming lessons again./ Yes, I got raped, but, still, I had to learn/ how to swim.” Oscillating between the real and the surreal, and memory and imagination, these entries will leave readers feeling as if they’ve emerged from these pages as though stumbling out of murky water—“the deepest, the darkest, the/ muddiest lake of them all/ in which the bones of corpses/ dissolve into cattails”—having paid witness to the secret world hidden there. This book is a triumph of storytelling by a master of craft. (Sept.)