Laura Kasischke’s most recent book, from which she will read, brings new poems together with work from her previous nine collections of poetry, published over the last twenty-five years. The citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which she received in 2011, reads: “No poet alive has worked harder to depict the contemporary American life course: she has shown herself, in sharply vivid poems, as a girl, as a wayward teen, as a young adult, as a passionate and worried mother with a baby, a child, and now a teenaged son…And no poet now at work does better than Kasischke in finding ways to depict not just how we feel about life stages and the people in them but also how we change as those stages go by…Kasischke stands for many among us.” Her collection of new and selected poems gathers together the breadth of this vision, and Kasischke will offer readings from both her earliest and most recent work.

Celebrated as both novelist and poet, Kasischke demonstrates a compelling wry humor and sense of incredulous horror as she mines the narratives and observations of what it means to exist. The Harvard Review describes her work as “wildly imaginative…memorable, often funny, always profound.” Her reading will be followed by an opportunity for questions about the writing process, her teaching, and her long association with the University of Michigan, from which she graduated in 1984 with a degree in Creative Writing and Literature from the Residential College.