A Beautiful Name for a Girl

Kirsten Kaschock

Human identity testing itself: are the speakers of these poems mother, teacher, creative artist—or are they merely bones to be sorted and juggled? The ramifications of identity (“we’d know… the translation / into mother to be exaltation. Murder, also”) leap up sharply in the book’s central poem, “Snuff Ballet,” in which one speaker, a dancer, is tested by inquisitors who may be a board from whom she seeks a grant. But perhaps these voices, which quickly become intimate and judgmental (“When was the last time you had sex?”), are merely criticism internalized, part of the “one-woman show.” This book’s poetics lie in the act of asking.

“A Beautiful Name for a Girl is a hypnotic and ravishing house, ﬁlled with trapdoors, curtains made out of the hides of changelings, and windows on the verge of shattering pain. Up and down the staircase, disappearing acts—like girls—‘grow big without you.’ Kaschock’s poems ‘avow / a new architecture,’ rooted by mothers cooking up a snuff that is both breath and its endless vanish. If Houdini himself had feasted on these mothers’ snuff, I have no doubt he would’ve thanked god for Kaschock and in her honor called his most mystifying trick the beautiful name that is ‘girl.’ ” —Sabrina Orah Mark

“Here’re all new episodes from Plath’s planetary mind, a lithic, mordant, ethereal place where a stone-faced girl stages tableaux maudits inside unnatural amphitheaters—the classroom, the heart, the doll, the bone. At once loud and muted, mineral and minor, the light of Kaschock’s mind is blue-black, sub-lunary, somnambulist, never dull.” —Joyelle McSweeney

“Kirsten Kaschock’s A Beautiful Name for a Girl prefers to celebrate the uncelebrated lives absent from categories; exhibiting their power, exploring conﬁnement while evolving into myths. Birds, sons, phantom daughters, reptiles, angels and dancers inhabit an unborn turmoil that is always at the brink of boiling over. A collection pregnant with re lease and ﬁerce genius.” —Reb Livingston