Katie Kalisz chronicles home and family
I’m trying to remember when I last read a poetry collection that spoke so warmly and movingly of home and family as Flu Season: Poems does. It’s been a while, but poet Katie Kalisz has more than filled the gap in my reading.
I learned Kalisz lives with a woodcutter, although I don’t think that’s what he does full-time. She watches him as he chops wood, describing every movement: “The spray of / sawdust looks like / confetti, the only sign / of change.” When he’s finished and comes through the door, she smells smoke and gasoline: “A little smoke. / A little danger. Bringing / him a glass of water / feels like inventing fire.” It’s a love poem, unusual to be sure, but a love poem nonetheless. A little later, in “Anniversary Poem,” she punches the love theme home.
She describes missing sleep with their baby and then listening to the child wake in the dawn hours. She brings out grandma’s clippers and gives her boys haircuts. Sitting at swim practice, she watches her husband while she imagines their honeymoon, or a revised version of it. She considers the weather as it affects her neighborhood. She writes lovingly about her parents. She writes a biography of her bones. She prepares the home garden for winter. She talks about what the children do for play. She visits her grandfather in the hospital, and she tells of her friend David, who dies “on the last day of the year, / really getting his money’s worth.”
Kalisz also has an existence apart from home and family. As she writes, she makes it clear that it, too, is part of the warp and woof of her life and can’t be compartmentalized. That existence is about writing.
First Book
I want to bury the boxes
of books in the yard, somewhere
the dog can’t dig them up. I want to
do it while it’s raining so the pages
get soaked, the ink bleeds out
of the words, the pages return
to their purity. But it is winter. The ground
is frozen. I have missed my chance.
Instead, this book becomes
another child to nurse through
the cold season, through the risk
of flu and other epidemics, under the constant
gray sky. Something else I must
tend and nourish. Something else to lug
around town with me on errands,
in case someone wants to buy a copy, wants to
torture me with attention like I am selling
watches from a gray trench coat.
Katie Kalisz
As an English professor at Grand Rapids Community College, Kalisz teaches composition and creative writing. Her first poetry collection, Quiet Woman, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Her poems have also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She received degrees from the University of Michigan, Loyola University of Chicago, and Queens University of Charlotte. Kalisz lives in Michigan.
Home and family form the core of Flu Season. Kalisz writes simply but powerfully. Flu Season is a love sonnet, to husband, family, home, and life.
Photo by jimpg2_2015, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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