Festival America Day 1

emulating her
powerful imagery
is impossible

Poetess and novelist extraordinaire, Laura Kasischke (right) is better known for her poetry in the USA and her novels in France. I've read both (just one of her poetry collections, though) and can attest to the way she finds deep connections to my experience as a human being. The "thriller" aspect of her prose work - not least in her latest novel, Mind of Winter - does not hamper this at all. Her poetry has an even more direct way of reaching the unconscious. I can't say for sure what it taps into, but it certainly is powerful.

We have had the great luck of attending a few conferences she participated in during Festival America.

Festival America happens every other year in a city just out of Paris - for various reasons we hadn't gone to the past two events and we were therefore delighted to be on Vincennes' sidewalks again. The way the festival works is that authors from all over North America come and take part in panels where they discuss a given subject ("Family in US literature", "New Orleans before and after Katrina", etc.). You choose the conferences you attend either for the subjects themselves or the authors participating in the panels.

I'm writing this on Sunday night, after attending two days of this. We really loved it this year - we got to meet Laura Kasischke (whose work I cannot recommend enough) and have her sign (very kindly and gracefully) two books of hers we have read over the past few years (one novel, one poetry collection) and we discovered quite a few authors we'll most certainly read over the next few months.