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Praise for Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer

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����������dz���’s Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer bravely crosses the rivers between genres to salvage the unpredictable and essential particulars of lived experience. We haunt the Divine Lorraine Hotel beside a speaker seeking to extract herself from the prefabricated narratives of family and gender. We hover inside an explosive abecedarian sequence. Throughout it all, we witness a dance comprised of sinew and wind, a mind unfettered by familiar architectures.

~ ERIC BAUS

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In her latest collection, poet and novelist Kaschock (The Dottery) evinces a fluid and playful relationship with both confessional poetry and science fiction, suggesting that neither can sufficiently establish a relationship to truth. What is confessional, after all, when “To scale these stories/ requires a system of pulleys and/ falsehoods./ Scaffolding. To clean/ things all the way up.” The book’s five long pieces are heavily engaged in worldbuilding, each piece serving as a window—“Windows are what make domesticity seem picturesque, in that windows make sculpture into painting”—into a richly developed narrative context. Whether the subject is a woman who is having an affair with a soon-to-be-demolished hotel called The Divine Lorraine or a suburban community that’s home to a host of suspicious characters and the site of a grisly murder, each piece is dense with activity and anxiety. The collection’s middle section, “The Fisherwoman’s Daughter,” functions as myth and ars poetica. Here, the importance of violence to ����������dz���’s poetry becomes clear: “Myrtle’s life is like all life—dependent on the endless digestion of smaller deaths, on their incorporation into the work.” As much a noir adventure as it is a sci-fi confessional, ����������dz���’s dynamic collection revels in expanding our understanding of genre, and life itself: “I wonder, Can what is not enough—be?"

~ PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

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