Laura Kasischke in her own words: "I realized while ordering and selecting the poems for this collection that much of my more recent work concerns body parts, dresses, and beauty queens. These weren''t conscious decisions, just the things that found their way into my poems at this particular point in my life, and which seem to have attached to them a kind of prophetic potential. The beauty queens especially seemed to crowd in on me, in all their feminine loveliness and distress, wearing their physical and psychological finery, bearing what body parts had been allotted to them. For some time, I had been thinking about beauty queens like Miss Michigan, but also the Rhubarb Queen, and the Beauty Queens of abstraction-congeniality. And then-Brevity, Consolation for Emotional Damages, Estrogen-all these feminine possibilities to which I thought a voice needed to be given."

Laura Kasischke is the author of six books of poetry, including Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004) and Dance and Disappear (winner of the 2002 Juniper Prize), and four novels. Her work has received many honors, including the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Emerging Writers. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.