Katie Kalisz is a keen observer of family and relationships
I enjoyed reading Flu Season: Poems by Katie Kalisz, so much so that I looked at her first poetry collection, Quiet Woman. I found the same keen eye upon family and relationships that I found in her later collection.
At the same time, her view is wider, including friends and relatives. The collection opens with the pregnant poet attending a funeral. A child, age unspecified, is in the casket, but a child who died before its mother. And she tries to imagine “the nearly grown child inside of me / dying before I did,” including the possible names of the child engraved on a gray gravestone and a memorial folder providing directions to the funeral luncheon. A later poem describes a wake for a 14-year-old girl, perhaps serving as the amplification of the funeral.
The poem is so understated that it becomes a surprising gut-punch. We can’t imagine something like this happening to a child of ours. And yet we know it happens.
Kalisz takes bits and pieces of scenes and images – a woman unwrapping a scarf from around her head, the name for those pregnancy stretch marks, parking next to a woman in a blue Oldsmobile, watching a man pour and smooth cement – and turns them into something larger. Scenes can shift quickly, like many memories and images. Her sister sitting in a stalled car on the shoulder of the interstate briefly touches a mother’s admonition and then moves into an amplification that perhaps no admonition was needed.
Cincinnati Sister
While your car stalls on I-75 and you sit on the shoulder
with our mother who is challenging you
to be more saintly than we know how to be yet
in our always young Catholic lives,
my husband holds my hand, makes me tea, carries
the laundry baskets up the steep basement stairs,
rubs my shoulder blades before I sleep.
His affection at the same time as your affliction—
of being new in a Midwestern city, being
the middle one, trying for once not to follow,
being frustrated at the small hotel room
and our mom in bed next to you—
muffles my good life, nontransferable
to you who needs it more right now.
If I could I would dry up your fresh tears
and find you a soft place to live,
or at least I would find you yourself, there
and give her back to you, like an original pebble
polished soft, placed inside your poem,
something you could keep forever.
Kalisz chronicles family trips, and watches “hiding in her room” as two teenaged boys mow the lawn. She sees the man’s groceries on the conveyor belt at the supermarket and realizes he must be a bachelor. She looks for mushrooms on Mother’s Day weekend. She recalls her grandmother who only read prayer cards she knew by heart and the death of a woman who cared for her as a young child. She starts small and moves to a larger idea.
Katie Kalisz
As an English professor at Grand Rapids Community College, Kalisz teaches composition and creative writing. Quiet Woman was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Award, and her poems have 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.
I liked Quiet Woman as much as Flu Season. Kalisz is a fine poet, and I’ve rarely seen such a keen, insightful eye on family life like I’ve seen in these two collections. Some poetry doesn’t age well; these poems are timeless.
Related:
Photo by bigbirdz, 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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Katie Spivey Brewster says
Oh, the empathy in “Cincinnati Sister” – what a caring heart!
I think Katie Kalisz is one quiet woman I’d like to know.