Laura Kasischke in her own words I realized while ordering and selectingthe poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns bodyparts dresse... » 

Laura Kasischke in her own words I realized while ordering and selectingthe poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns bodyparts dresses and beauty queens. These werent conscious decisions just thethings that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my lifeand which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. Thebeauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me in all their feminineloveliness and distress wearing their physical and psychological finerybearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time I had beenthinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan but also the Rhubarb Queenand the Beauty Queens of abstractioncongeniality. And thenBrevityConsolation for Emotional Damages Estrogenall these feminine possibilities towhich I thought a voice needed to be given. Laura Kasischke is the authorof six books of poetry including Gardening in the Dark Ausable Press 2004and Dance and Disappear winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize and four novels.Her work has received many honors including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Awardfrom the Poetry Society of America the Beatrice Hawley Award the PushcartPrize and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches atthe University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. «