Katie Kalisz’s second volume of poems, Flu Season, traces five sections of time and experience involving what Jim Daniels calls the “sweet longing and love” celebrating “the everyday, while dreading what might interrupt it.” These poems continue the approaches developed in her first book, Quiet Woman, yet the themes here show even greater clarity and depth, her ars poetica displaying a more sophisticated command of alliterative phrasings, sometimes indenting the lines as in the best of William Carlos Williams’s “variable foot” poems, and employing lists in some poems, what Ted Berrigan once noted as “the highest form of prosody.” In her poem “Filleting a Fried Trout,” she employs the instructions for carefully removing the trout’s small skeleton as an emblem for exactness in prosody, as in holding it up, pointing to “the beauty in the symmetry / of the bones, even in the spaces between / the bones, in the way it all holds together.”
The everyday in the passage of time involves illnesses from the flu, pneumonia, and covid, the anxieties of loss and the tragedies of the deaths of loved ones and neighbors, her own anxieties charted carefully in their appearances in time, and in the fears of what one will do after the anticipated loss of her partner, father, and others. Yet there are lighter moments, too: “River Swim” is a delightful sharing of love,
while neighbors gaze at our playful ritual,
your gaze a grateful gleam. We swim upriver
to delight in the glide downstream
through a small rapids feet first
navigating rocks and holding hands
around the bend that shows us home.
The innocence of “Red Circles,” presents her children dressing up for “amateur magic tricks” in planning a circus—yet in the world beyond, the “New York Times /digital map of the outbreak” points to the presence of illness. Closer to home, a neighbor dies from a brain tumor amid many other anxieties, including her concerns for her children: “Why didn’t I think to build them / a bunker beneath this troubled world we nurture”? Death and the loss of relatives, friends, and their babies appear again and again. To her credit, Kalisz explores her anticipatory anxieties in the collections of clothing to wear at funerals, soaps and other items, finally coming to terms with the source of this, realizing at last that she has inherited her mother’s “planning for loss. / Worry balloons around me, floats like /it’s at a party it doesn’t know / was cancelled.” The book rises to crisis in the lost child at the amusement park, and in the “Midwest Invasions, an Abecedarian,” wherein she lists the many invasive species overwhelming the native species in the Midwest. In “Candy Cigarettes,” she notes that her children are given gifts for “donating their blood to science because / a company dumped waterproofing chemicals / nearby; they test and retest our well, / our blood, for the toxic plume of PFAS.” The final section of the book, “Hush Now,” turns toward acceptance: commenting on apainting by Andrea Kowch, she notes that
It’s a scene between seasons, on the cusp of change,
Waiting. The last of something. Like us, it’s impermanent
—the girls will go back inside later, the wind will die down,
The day will draw to its end, the window will close.
The butterflies will alight to a different field. We will all
Leave soon enough. Let us sojourn here a little while longer.
The book concludes with a firm resolution: “Hush now—here is a lullaby: /forage in the woods, swing on the tire swing, rocking to sleep, like we live between the pages /of a hymnal, and any moment now, someone / will open it to find us here, content.” It has been said that an excellent book reflects the concerns and cautions of its time, and Katie Kalisz’s book certainly fulfills that concept in this dark age of deep anxiety and the horrors humanity lives with now. She ends on a note of struggling for that inner peace seeking for kindness and content, as such a book should.
—David Cope
David Cope has published 9 books and 2 chapbooks. He has received the Pushcart Prize (1977), The American Academy/Institute of Arts & Letters Award in Literature (1988), and was Grand Rapids Poet Laureate (2011-2014). He is editor of three anthologies: Nada Poems (1988), Sunflowers & Loco-motives: Songs for Allen (1998), and Song of the Owashtanong: Grand Rapids Poetry in the 21st Century (2013). Cope has been a visiting poet at Naropa University on several occasions, and spent 18 years as a school custodian and 22 years as a Shakespeare professor and curriculum developer at Grand Rapids Community College. Cope’s 47 years as editor and publisher of Big Scream magazine featured 60 issues publishing over 200 poets. The David Cope Papers (1907-2023) are curated at the University of Michigan Special Collections Library and Resource Center; his webpage is located at the Museum of American Poetics. He has been married for 54 years; his three adult children maintain successful careers in their chosen fields.
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