Confessional Sci-fi: A Primer by Kirsten Kaschock Subito Press, 2017 Before I even opened the book, Kirsten Kaschock's collection had me with its title: Confessional Sci-fi: A Primer (Subito Press, 2017). I was immediately excited — Confessional and Sci-fi are both complex genre tags that interest me, and the label A Primer dangles a suggestion that this really would be something new, preparing me to enter a new genre. And while I was excited just from reading the title, I really didn't know what to expect. To my delight, Kaschock's collection delivers a range of fresh, challenging hybrid pieces, moving far past what initially interested me in its title. Kaschock uses a formal flexibility and inventiveness to pursue a kind on intimacy I don't normally associate with science fiction. Not just the intimacy suggested by confessional, that of revealing personal secrets or inner darkness, but an intimacy where the reader is zoomed in so close to a subject that it becomes destabilizing. Kaschock writes "This is not to be a ghost story. This is pornography" (8). Science Fiction imagines new possibilities and considers what could be. Kaschock's Confessional Sci-fi imagines a radical type of intimacy that might show us what already is there if we could ever get that close. While this zoomed in intimacy can be destabilizing, like so much of my favorite poetry, it reveals new ways to see the world. Each of the five pieces in this book uses a different form. The opening "Oh, Lorraine" reads like diary entries, "The Fisherwoman's Daughter" like mythology, and not until the final section, "Windowboxing: a Dance with Saints in Three Acts," does Kaschock offer pages that even look like traditional lineated poetry. "Oh Lorraine" is a stunning introduction which opens: In three years, I will leave my husband, my three boys (aged 11, 8 and nearly 6) to move into the Divine Lorraine Hotel for the three months prior to its scheduled demolition (3). Here Kaschock writes a speaker that is traditionally "confessional," but with a certainty of her future, an intimacy with what cannot yet be known. "Oh, Lorraine" plays with this tension, the reader encountering a mysterious environment that keeps unfolding with strange new revelations while the narrator speaks confidently about what will happen. This piece sets the tone for being both "Confessional" and "Sci-Fi," offering an intimacy beyond the possible. I was most taken by the second piece, "A Bedroom Community Diary." To call it an abecedarian is distinctly not giving enough credit to its form, which hinges on ruminations about each letter of the alphabet interspersed between a series of anecdotes about a small town's mounting tragedies. Each letter, its sound and its shape, works to give insights to the shifting, grave observations about this town: I. Imagine a map. Situated by a medium sized metropolis, do not guess which, a town bristles. Develops gooseflesh. In some ways the town is like an igloo. It may seem cold, but was designed with the best intention: to protect inhabitants from the wrong elements. Indecency. Idealism. Immigration. Idolatry. Intellect. Illness. Illumination. If this town has a thousand words for outsider, one of them is artist (21). Here the formal maneuver pushes the piece to new places. The decision to interrogate each letter and alliterative words allows Kaschock to interrogate the town in ways that the narrative alone wouldn't achieve. Much of the book is written in prose with a narrative sense, but Kaschock delivers so many moments like this, where language is privileged and marveled over as it reveals new ways of understanding. In between these reflections on each letter, "A Bedroom Community Diary" shifts quickly through observations of the tragic events and unusual characters that make up the town: several murders, a historical porn collector, a fifteen-year-old animal mutilator, a priest puking out of a helicopter. The piece moves so quickly through events and characters that it feels disorienting. I don't think the text expects its readers to feel entirely certain about each of the town's narratives. Instead, the piece works to grow this sense of disorientation as the stories are piled on top of each other. I was reminded of Renee Gladman's The Activist, another experimental work that made me feel a similarly disoriented. In Gladman's text, shifting perspectives on the same events force the reader to reconsider which account is true, or what the truth even means. Here, Kaschock creates a disorienting sensation by piling on these zoomed in, intimate moments. As much as it is disorienting, this piling on feels similar to being inundated every day with bits and pieces of bad news. The sensation isn't that too removed from checking my Twitter feed right when I wake up, scrolling through new revelations of awfulness. Here though, Kaschock focuses this sensation on the intimate, zooming in on the town and its people to an impossible level of intimacy, revealing a hidden ugliness that could be sitting all around us. The final three pieces continue pushing Kaschock's zoomed in intimacy to impossible places, until you begin "feeling more at home not feeling at home in your own skin" (56). "After Museum" feels particularly out there, as you are guided by a winged, ape-like, angel-thing docent through a museum's absurd rooms. What initially feels like a psychedelic trip proves to be another case of an intimacy beyond the possible. In the final piece, "Windowboxing: a Dance with Saints in Three Acts," Kaschock writes "Nothing private is natural" (74), which may get to the heart of what confessional sci-fi is all about. If we could zoom in as close as Kaschock allows us, zoom all the way into an intimacy with the private, what would we see? Confessional Sci-fi: A Primer offers one vision, one that is both dark and wondrous, one that keeps revealing more with each read. Visit Subito Press' Website

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