kirsten kaschock
Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
Rather than transcribing lived experience directly, I choose to make strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.
Arranged as a gallery walk, AutoPortrait alternates between masque-like encounters with art and reflective passages engaging memory and desire. Influenced by photographers Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman, Kaschock uses lines and shapes provided by those referenced here (painters, musicians, and poets) to sketch an impression of a woman artist.
Available from Tupelo Press. September 2026.
“Kirsten Kaschock’s poems are a pleasure. As she says, quoting Rothko, “I won’t be tied to bedposts of the literal”… In the steadily surprising flow of her language, thought, and feeling we count ourselves lucky to play along, through visions of childhood, parenthood, and worlds of intensest artistic imagining. ”
Winner of the 2025 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press .
Now available at umasspress.com (using code UMASS20
to save 20%) or at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, Amazon
or anywhere books are sold.
“This book is an intensely moving exploration of the way we risk everything we have for the ones we love and still get it wrong. Agnes and Solo will power my heart for a long time. Every sentence of this novel gives more than I thought possible.”
““…Kaschock’s gestures are contemporary, jagged, and stop-start, wonderfully torqued and rippling with unexpected flights, breaks, and drops.” ”
DEFINED
To manufacture hunger I need
time and a stick and at the end
dangling like a fish from thread—
carrot. And the carrot withered
with a bitter beard. Hunger has come
when I would with the stick beat
my babysister for half that old man
carrot. The other half, the stick,
the thread, my own hand holding
its famine-machine a foot beyond
the other one: these bits I call art.
