From Traci Brimhall, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2023-2026: "In Katie Kalisz's Flu Season, a welcome is also a warning. Daily anxieties caution us at every cough and intersection and goodbye kiss. There are dreads we pass down, an inheritance of fear that blooms at each creep of poison ivy, each thunderhead. Kalisz investigates the way time slows during illness, the season opening up and every act becoming a prayer. These poems engage with the idea of home-its serpentine surprise, its necessary violence, its bondage of calm. There are tendernesses we can't live without, and so these poems search for a place in the earth where we could hide from the world we've made."
