The Nightgown & Other Poems

(Paperback)

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"What an absolutely delectable book of poems! Reading The Nightgown and Other Poems is like wading through a glorious bog of rich, evocative language and eerie creatures. And while these poems are fairytales, they dont necessarily have happy endingswhich is not to say that you wont feel their magic. Taisia Kitaiskaia finds magic in creatures as strange as goblins and as mundane as jam and butter. I read this entire book, put it down, and immediately picked it back up because I wasnt yet done wading into these wild and witchy poems. Read The Nightown and youll see the world through Kitaiskaias eyes, which is to say, in a completely new and enchanting light." Julia DeVarti, Literati Bookstore

Kitaiskaia is the author of Literary Witches, which made waves in 2017 with everyone from The New Yorker to the Washington Post to Maria Popovas Brain Pickings. Excellent pick for fans of the feminist mythology/fairytale themes in Carmen Maria Machados Her Body and Other Parties. She immigrated to the US from Russia, reflected in The Nightgowns themes of outsidership/linguistic curiosity/Eastern European folktales. She is also married to Fernando Flores, author of FSG-published Tears of the Trufflepig and bookseller at Malvern Books in Austin, TX.

Reviews

LONGLISTED for Reading the West Book Award

The strangest, most memorable poems, which will itch your ear long after reading them. Taisia Kitaiskaia's new book is something to hold close, to find a different way to be in this world. 'Now I am happy to be your cactus. I have little cactus dreams...' These are poems you will remember like a map of the supernatural world that lives around us all the time, unseen. Taisia sees for us though, and with remarkable clarity! You will love this book! CA Conrad, author of While Standing in Line for Death

Under Taisia Kitaiskaia's Nightgown is the body of a fairytale with a belly like a kettle brewing something ancient and futuristic, tender and feral. Each poem is an amulet, charmed and broken and glistening. Each poem glows like the fullest moon. Reading Kitaiskaia is like reading spells off rare parchment. She might be the poet who is missing from every fairytale you've ever read. Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk

For fans of Taisia Kitaiskaias previous books, Im here to tell you her poetry debut is every bit as wild, witchy, and visionary as you could have hoped. In The Nightgown, Taisia's ongoing exploration of the folklore of the self voyages into exciting new territory. Prepare to step inside a menagerie of evil potatoes and misbehaving angels, imaginary gardens and real toads. Its an experience as beguiling as a wedding ceremony you never fully learn the rules to. This book left me completely drunk and I dont regret it and neither will you. Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet

What do you expect to see when you look deeply into the foreign wounds on your body Taisia shows you how to descend into the tender bog, how to relish the unknown creatures brushing past you, and... Please, don't be alarmed when her poem guides your hand to draw a card that speaks too loud. It is only your friend, your shadow, waiting for you to break the ice. Jiyoon Lee, author of Foreigners Folly and translator of Blood Sisters

The Nightgown is not the ethereal, diaphanous sleeping frock of fairytales. It's carnal, fleshly. Its angels have hairy fingers. A soul is a thing you can pet. There's lots of butter, meat, glasses of milk. The love is strenuous, and the impossible starves on. The only thing these poems have in common with fairytales is their dark brain and crepuscular faces. I'm ensorcelled by their logic, which is soluble in its own sentences (and the syllogisms are such: if you're ravished by a rabbit, you've been rabbished, haha). The poems read like stories, but they are not going forward to an end they are going backward, into the history of their own words. In one poem, the writer asks if she can be a man of God and the poem ends "the little wormings, i do love" ahh, yes! not the book she is writing, or the words, but the insects that eat them, which of course, in these poems of anglo saxon meatiness are called wormings. I loved the words in these poems. Where oh where, Taisia Kitaiskaia, did you get those nouns! What big texture you have! It would be perfect if this book's cover were made of human hair, and we could stroke it as we read. Darcie Dennigan, author of Palace of Subatomic Bliss and Madame X

Fairytales are grim creatures, part teeth, part terror, but nevertheless, too seductive to resist. Taisias poems crawl out from the river like a nymph to offer that poisoned apple, of which I gladly bite, in search of that imaginary orgasm. mnica teresa ortiz, author of muted blood

"In such moribund, retrograde times as ours, it is wildly bracing to encounter such unapologetic and joyously imaginative intensity as Taisia Kitaiskaia's poems convey. It is difficult to express how wonderful this book is because its extraordinary magic is transformative and seems to have changed me into a seahorse. I love being a seahorse." Dean Young, author of Solar Perplexus

"Taisias poems make you think of the poem as an apothecarys pill without being able to verify its true origins, and getting only some encrypted apothecary verse that provides only the faintest suggestion of what elements the pill might even contain, you take it anyway, you trust it almost completely a pill presented ever neatly yet ominously to you in the palm of your hand, a pill that appears to encapsulate an entire psychosomatic experience. Taisias fablesque poems come from this faraway place, or, rather, a place we are made to believe is faraway but is really just close enough to have heard enough news of civilizations operas. To read these poems, we must walk along a trail that moves from idyllic to horrific and then back again in the pace of a gallop before we reach the door to the apothecary who will gift us that pill, equal parts restorative and poison. It is this tension between that which is presented tenderly and that which menacingly refuses total encapsulation, which makes the most lanuginous of us curl-up at the base of the rocking chair and ask the storyteller for 'another one!' again and again." Valerie Hsiung, author of You & Me Forever and outside voices, please

Author Bio

Taisia Kitaiskaia was born in Russia and raised in America. She is the author of Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles and its follow-up, Poetic Remedies for Troubled Times from Ask Baba Yaga, as well as Literary Witches: A Celebration of Magical Women Writers, a collaboration with artist Katy Horan and an NPR Best Book of 2017. She has received fellowships from Yaddo and the James A. Michener Center for Writers. She lives in Austin, Texas.