Lilies Without is Laura Kasischke's seventh volume of poetry. Widely admired for her startling use of metaphor and her nervy, surprising syntax, she continues in this book to peel back the skins of our ordinary lives to reveal the underlying anxieties and complexities. Funny, irreverent, personal, and at the same time unnerving, these poems take us to familiar places made entirely strange so that we may see them again as they really are, without the trappings and disguises we invent so as to remain blind to what disturbs us. Few poets write about parenthood with the combination of tenderness and steely insight that Kasischke brings to her work. Of this quality, Jonathan Weinert has written that [Kasischke] "succeeds in joining a fiercely personal self-reckoning to a searching intelligence within a heightened and authentic suburban idiom."   

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

"…the poems in Laura Kasischke's Lilies Without, achieve their ends by revealing the deeper (and darker) implications of everyday life, messing with our notions of the domestic and the sacred. Kasichke's poems are powered by a skillful use of imager and the subtle, ingenious way she turns a phrase…. In some of these poems. she takes beauty queens as her subject, only to turn that iconic figure of American optimism on its head…. Lured ahead by Kasischke's patented casual lyric, we find ourselves surprised by the heat of the implications that follow."
—Carrie Fountain, Austin American-Statesman

" Not much light penetrates the gloom of Laura Kasischke’s bewitching new collection, which conjures a mood of misty portent…. Kasischke’s atmospherics work as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. A suite of marvelous poems playing on the conventions of beauty pageants and pinups is no less mysterious than “New Dress,” but because the poems’ concerns–sexual, political, personal–are clearer, they both beguile and satisfy. The excellent “At Gettysburg” is successful for similar reasons. We know where we are and the significance of the place; we soon know the characters present and their relationships to each other…. This is a book of tremendous imaginative energy… which often blossoms into truly engaging weirdness.”
—Joel Brouwer, Poetry Foundation

"I love the twists of humor as much as the twists of plot; this is a book to read and re-read, discovering more winks and wonderings among the lines. Kasischke's forms, open and direct, seem to offer space for reader response, perhaps even participation in the conversations of the volume. I plan to keep my copy on the nearest shelf, ready for more." —Beth Kanell, Kingdom Books

"Gardening in the Dark is more fun to read than a collection so relentlessly gloomy has any right to be. The surfaces of many of its poems are so dazzling, their figurations so delightful and unexpected, that the depths beneath may be initially obscured. One responds first to the music of these poems, and only later takes in the full measure of their darkness." —Pleiades

"At its best, the collection succeeds in joining a fiercely personal self-reckoning to a searching intelligence within a heightened and authentic suburban idiom. Kasischke gives us a taste for the unmedicated nerve, for the undiluted darkness, and she show us how to find them here, in America." —Pleiades

"Her extravagant metaphorical inventiveness charges and inflates the commonplace items of the deceptively ordinary world her speakers inhabit, transforming those objects into talismans of portent or menace." —Pleiades

“Kasischke walks that perfect Plathian line between the everyday—making macaroni and cheese, getting pulled over for speeding—and the eternal, the plainspoken and the lyrical, the comfortable and the abyss of loss that lies just beneath it.” —Time Magazine, “7 Books of Poetry to Curl Up With”

“Kasischke’s intelligence is most apparent in her syntactic control and pace, the way she gauges just when to make free verse speed up, or stop short, or slow down.”  —The New York Times 

"When Laura Kasischke writes poems, something big happens…. Yes, she finds vivid images and injects a little narrative into her verses, too. But she also makes connections that may not seem apparent, creating fine metaphors and engaging in a kind of free association of thought that links her own impressions to the world." —The Kansas City Star