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Book Description

Eric Hoffer Award Finalist Kin Types is a collection of lyric poetry, prose poetry, and flash prose that imaginatively retells the lives of private individuals from previous generations. Using family history research, the writer has reconstructed the stories of women and men from Michigan to Illinois to the Netherlands. Read together, the pieces create a history of women dealing with infant mortality, vanity, housewife skills, divorce, secret abortion, the artist versus mother dilemma, mysterious death, wife beating, and a brave heroine saving a family’s home. 

Excerpts

Someone Else’s Story

All the ways of self-pity were open to her.

With a bitter putty she sealed each off. A wife

and mother alone with strangers, skimming

milk and scraping her knuckles on the washboard

for these middle-aged farmers and their son

almost her own age. She knelt on the floor

and scrubbed and scrubbed because she felt

too tired to stand. She avoided their eyes.

Twice when they thought she was out at the barn

she’d heard them talking about her as if she

were a cow hobbled for the sake of her calf.

That’s when her story sounded to her like that

of someone else, a poor orphan in a book

she’d read in another life. Yet she was no orphan,

her mother living in the city, caring for

her grandson who still wore white dresses and ringlets.

Her story sounded harsh and chronological,

even cold. A young couple with their first baby

and no reason to think there wouldn’t be more.

The husband’s wagon is hit by a streetcar.

Because he’s lost his wits, he’s sent to the asylum

in Kalamazoo, too far to visit more than twice

a year. The young wife can only support herself

as a live-in and sends her wages to her mother.

Better not to think of these things and to study

late at night her correspondence course.

Work study work study. She was no cow.

Caroline Meier Waldeck

1872-1946

Gaines Township, Kent County, Michigan

###

14 May 1897

What Came Between A Woman and Her Duties

On this Friday, in our fair city of Kalamazoo, Recreation Park refreshment proprietor, John Culver, has applied to the Circuit Court to gain custody of his two young daughters from his divorced wife. The girls currently reside in the Children’s Home. They were accompanied to court by Miss Bradley, the matron of the home.

Mrs. Culver, the divorcée, and the children were represented by J. W. Adams. The father was represented by F.E. Knappen.  Mrs. Culver, pale and stern-looking, wore a shirtwaist with tightly ruched collar and generous mutton sleeves. The strain of her situation shows clearly on her visage. In the past, Mrs. Culver has been aided and abetted by her female friends in the art of painting, as an article of 6 February 1895 in this very daily can attest.

A large number of friends of both parties were in the courtroom and heard emotional pleadings on both sides. Judge Buck ascertained that Mrs. Culver is engaged in the pursuit of an honest living at this time and so ordered that the children remain in the mother’s care. She was given six months to bring them home from the orphanage or they will go into the care of their father and his mother. Let us hope that Mrs. Culver can stay away from the easel.

© Luanne Castle

Praise for Kin Types

Welcome to Luanne Castle’s Kin Types, where every piece, poem or prose, is a ghost–but not the sort you can see through. You see, Castle’s ghosts have been resurrected through powerful emotion and startling detail, have been made suddenly solid and real again with a skill that brings to mind the work of Edgar Lee Masters. Herein we find all the heart and heartbreak of ordinary lives from the past finally valuated properly, given their own set of lines and stanzas, their own sentences and paragraphs, the attention and care of a gifted and sympathetic writer. Which is to say, you’re going to want to stick around for a while. Kin Types exists at the precise place where literature and history intersect to make something both beautiful and true. –Justin Hamm, author of American Ephemeral, editor of the museum of americana

Luanne Castle’s Kin Types is based largely upon genealogy and a fascination with what comes to all of us from the past. A mix of poetry in the traditional sense and highly poetic prose pieces, the collection takes the reader on a journey into the lives of women and somewhat into the lives of men who must carry on alone once the women are gone. The journey of this collection is not a ramble into the past, but a slingshot into the here and now by way of these portrait tales. Of particular importance to readers are these lines from «What Lies Inside: » What lies outside my mind is nothing. Mother’s bones cleaner / than steak bones, buildings diminish to the horizon. // Inside my mind / a junkyard, castoffs from outside others, / flickering and igniting when struck on its inside walls. Clearly, Castle is letting us know that she (and we) are all inhabited by stories of our ancestors. Castle explores the warnings and quirks of relatives in poem after poem. Perhaps Castle is also issuing a warning in «Advice From My Forebears» to those whose lives are lived by the word and pen: Don’t quit writing like I did. Make me a promise. The whole collection is a promise, and not to be missed, whether for its flashlight into the past or its beam into the future. –Carol Willette Bachofner, Poet Laureate Emerita of Rockland, Maine

You can read six reviews on Luanne Castle’s Website. Here are opening lines of one of the reviews by Carla McGill, which you can finish reading on the website:

Most people enjoy hearing family stories, narratives about one’s own ancestors and also those of others. We instinctively know that people from the past have something to teach us, that we will learn something about ourselves and about history from hearing stories about them. The new chapbook by Luanne Castle, Kin Types (Finishing Line Press, 2017), is an inventive approach to family narratives and a suitable collection to follow Doll God (Aldrich Press, 2015), her first book of poetry. That collection encompasses aspects of her own childhood and adult life, and this one features sketches of late relatives in both poetry and prose……

Available on Amazon in Paperback

Author Biography

Luanne Castle lives in Arizona, next to a wash that wildlife use as a thoroughfare. She has published two full-length poetry collections, Rooted and Winged (Finishing Line Press 2022), a Book Excellence Award Winner, and Doll God (Kelsay Books 2015), which won the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbooks are Our Wolves (Alien Buddha Press 2023), First Runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Award, and Kin Types (Finishing Line Press 2017), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. Luanne’s Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, Best Microfictions, and Best of the Net-nominated poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, Your Impossible Voice, Gooseberry Pie, Bending Genres, Bull, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Cleaver, Disappointed Housewife, South 85, Roi Fainéant, River Teeth, The Dribble Drabble Review, Flash Boulevard, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, Pleiades, American Journal of Poetry, The Mackinaw, Thimble, One Art, Lothlorien, River Teeth, MasticadoresUSA, Storyteller Poetry Journal, TAB, and other journals. Her Best of the Net-nominated mixed-media art has been showcased at Watershed Review, Wildscape, Mad Swirl, Raw Lit, and Thimble. Luanne blogs at Writer Site.