Because the Sky Is a Thousand Soft Hurts

In her brilliant collection Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts, Elizabeth Kirschner fearlessly blends poetry, prose, memoir, and master storytelling into an amalgam that lands like a gut-punch to the soul. I literally found myself taking a deep breath at the beginning and the end of each story, to both steel and re-orient myself. There is nothing easy about the magic Kirschner casts; rather, its complexity serves to illuminate the indomitability of the human spirit in those deep, dark places where it would seem no spirit could survive. This is a devastatingly beautiful book. -Laura Hurwitz, author of Disappear Home Because the Sky is a Thousand Soft Hurts is a master stroke. Brimming with a hallucinatory spirit, these are less stories and more poetic and metaphysical voyages. In this collection, Kirschner gives voice to the disturbed and hopeful in her characters' psyches-penetrating the repressed, thrust into the sublime. In its earlier stories, Kirschner brilliantly reinvents the simile, with it granting every sentence a double-life; and the later sections prove not only beautiful in their prose, but with keen sense of narrative drive. A literary achievement, this collection rewards re-reading over and over again. -Jonathan Koven, author of Palm Lines and editor of Toho Journal

About the Author :
Elizabeth Kirschner has published five volumes of poetry, including My Life as a Doll and Surrender to Light. The former was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Patterson Book Prize and named Kirschner as the Literary Arts Fellow in the state of Maine, in 2010. Her memoir, Walking the Bones, was published in 2015. Kirschner has been writing and teaching multi-genres across four decades. She served as faculty in Fairfield University's low-residence MFA in Creative Writing Program and has also taught at Boston College and Carnegie-Mellon University. She has collaborated with many classical composers and this work is featured on numerous CDs, including The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons, Schumann/Kirschner. She currently serves as a writing mentor and manuscript consultant and teaches various workshops in and around her community in Kittery Point, Maine. Khristine Hvam has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards, placed three times as a finalist for the prestigous Audie Award, and won the Audie Award for Best Narration in 2012 and 2013. She studied acting for the theater and film, and her voice can be heard in Pokémon, World of Warcraft, and in various television and radio commercials.