Reviewing Kirsten Kaschock's EXPLAIN THIS CORPSE

I was pleased to discover poet and dancer Kirsten Kaschock’s work this year, and privileged to review her fiercely smart new book for Southern Indiana Review. I’d like to write at least one book review per year, but they’re frankly really time-consuming for me, and so far I’ve averaged one every 2-3 years instead—hoping to post another one here in 2022 :)

Read my review, and seriously, check out Kaschock’s work!

“To read Kirsten Kaschock’s Explain This Corpse, winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry, is to enter a sort of poetic matrix. These are not poems that give primacy to feeling, though they contain it. Their purpose seems not to be to perform or elicit emotion, as much as to use it as a tool to show us other truths. Kaschock spins ordinary material into new worlds of speculation and experience, using surrealism, language play, and metaphor so stuck-with that it feels literal: the poetic self draws herself into being along with the hyper-real world around her. In the book’s ars poetica proem, the speaker declares:

To manufacture hunger I need
time and a stick and at the end
dangling like a fish from thread—
carrot…

At the end of the short poem the diagram is sketched even more clearly:

…the stick,
the thread, my own hand holding
its famine-machine a foot beyond
the other one…

With Kaschock’s syncopated, muscular rhythms and idiosyncratic syntax, “old man carrot,” the stick, time are all made tactile, real.

Not “real” as in something encountered in the world. Real as in material. In this poem’s word-world, time is as tangible as stick, as hunger. The proem ends with the speaker saying, in her signature stylized colloquialism: “those bits I call art.” And in this collection every bit of the world—self, galaxies, politics, language—is used in service of art, which is to say in service of a moving machine (or body) that makes ideas.

Stronger-than-metaphor play with object and language recurs throughout. “The Cape was pale, and as I threw it round my shoulders, I depleted my ridinghood,” Kaschock writes in a poem that uses the speaker’s presumably literal visit to Cape Cod as a way to explore witchcraft and womanhood. Landscape, body, concept all swirling together in the field.”