Kaschock, Kirsten: Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer

Subito Press (paperback, 2017)

Publisher Marketing: CONFESSIONAL SCI-FI: A PRIMER is a book of in-between spaces and times. No one is quite what or where or when they seem to be. Each of the five prosepoetic pieces in the book has a narrative although it would be more difficult (though not impossible) to say each has a plot. Identity is interrogated here, but also community, and also the isolation that is unique to our current non-time—when our spheres of contact are more virtual than visceral.

Fiction and poetry are both types of distortion: what happens to representation when representation fails. In theater, mask work is done to get beneath the (sur)face. Each of these five pieces delve into different facets of autobiography while resisting realism at every turn. They are: the Lynchian-suburban pastoral, the urban-ruin-porn of midlife crisis, the psychologically-fabular herstory, the trauma-imbued dreamscape, and a synthetic meditation on the domestic-virtual.

"Kaschock's CONFESSIONAL SCI-FI: A PRIMER bravely crosses the rivers between genres to salvage the unpredictable and essential particulars of lived experience. We haunt the Divine Lorraine Hotel beside a speaker seeking to extract herself from the prefabricated narratives of family and gender. We hover inside an explosive abecedarian sequence. Throughout it all, we witness a dance comprised of sinew and wind, a mind unfettered by familiar architectures."—Eric Baus