Explain This Corpse

Winner of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry

“Sophisticated and cerebral gymnastics of language sway with gravity through the poems and poetic sequences of Explain This Corpse. Throughout, Kirsten Kaschock’s gestures are contemporary, jagged, and stop-start, wonderfully torqued and rippling with unexpected flights, breaks, and drops. After centuries of literary glamourizing of young, dead heroines, this poet declares a preference for survival, including its inevitable toll of aging, toward a more practical and elemental transcendence. These poems show us an extension and evolution of the legacy of Hopkins and Berryman—a sort of sprung verse for the twenty-first century, an urgent engagement with the world so obliquely signaled here.”—Carolyne Wright, final judge, Blue Lynx Prize 2019