A Beautiful Name for a Girl

Kirsten Kaschock

An author’s statement

In this collection, perhaps the author is looking for herself inside a list of characters she is unlike. Perhaps the author is tossing off scarves. Perhaps she is all scarf. What might be more plausible is that the author is inhabited by many characters she does not understand. Important then, to acknowledge and vivisect one’s inner fish. Sometimes, the characters themselves are also inhabited by strangers; sometimes they have yet to meet their houseguests. Occasionally, although infested, they never meet those inside themselves at all. This collection is about the failure of any one character to fully inhabit one role. This collection is about the transcendence of personhood beyond role, beyond body, beyond gender. Failure is, in this way, transcendence.

A character, a name, a body: these are facets, and the persons suggested by these poems are intricately cut. The central poem in the collection, “Snuff Ballet,” is a monologue for 2, 3, or 7 people. That is perhaps the author’s point. I do not like to speak for her. This collection is about the freedom that comes from speaking in the third person, about others. This collection is about the freedom that comes from speaking in the third person about oneself. These poems imagine that speaking of others and of the self are part of the same project. Can a poem imagine? These poems imagine that a poem can. The author is perhaps attempting to create a new hybrid form: confessional sci-fi.

Nothing in these poems has happened, and yet there is shame. Shame has been described by Sartre as the guarantor of the existence of the other. Perhaps the author buys this. Certainly, the characters in these poems are looking for the existence of others, attempting to connect while locked in the boxes of name and body. If shame is the feeling at the keyhole, they accept it as the price of sticking their tongues and fingers through. Sometimes, they stick through knives and guns and words that hurt. Once in awhile, they imagine other types of creatures—who could fit through. And then, they are disabused. If these poems are concerned with pain, it is pain as the guarantor of feeling. If there is an enemy for these characters, it is numbness. If these poems love their words, they love their about-ness more. Is this preferring one child over another? Perhaps it is. Perhaps this is just another of the failures that proves the author human.