Overview

A story of mothers, monsters, and the science of longing In this daring and evocative tale, Agnes Krahn, a chemist trained in Philadelphia, returns to her childhood home after the death of her father. Just a stone's throw from the haunted fields of Gettysburg, the small town of Letort, Pennsylvania is where the Krahn family has lived for six generations—bound by twisted folk wisdom and an uncanny kinship with the crows that loom over their land. Back in the grim farmhouse of her youth, Agnes is drawn into the strange legacy she tried to leave behind. When she discovers an abandoned nest in the barn, she becomes consumed by a scientific—and deeply personal—experiment: to breed a crow large and intelligent enough to carry her daughter, Mina, to a freedom Agnes has never known herself. As the bird grows, so does its terrifying potential—manifest in language, cunning, and a violent will of its own. What begins as a gesture of love and liberation turns darkly obsessive, echoing the dangerous ambition of Frankenstein’s monster and the generational trauma buried in the soil of her family’s past. A thoroughly modern, feminist novel, this is a story of mothers and daughters, inheritance and isolation, and the thin line between care and control. It confronts themes of self-harm and self-preservation, as well as memory and myth, in a narrative as visceral and uncanny as the bird that rises at its heart.

Full Product Details

9781625349255

Table of Contents

Reviews

""An Impossibility of Crows is, itself, impossibly lyric and ambitious, an Iliad of parenting, of ambivalence, self-sacrifice and care. A divorce-poem and a tale of scientific obsession - tragic, feminist and sublime as Shelley's Frankenstein, but quick-paced, wry and gorgeous for the 21st century.""--Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox and Night Night Fawn

“An Impossibility of Crows is, itself, impossibly lyric and ambitious, an Iliad of parenting, of ambivalence, self-sacrifice and care. A divorce-poem and a tale of scientific obsession - tragic, feminist and sublime as Shelley's Frankenstein, but quick-paced, wry and gorgeous for the 21st century.” - Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox and Night Night Fawn

Author Information

Kirsten Kaschock, a Pew Fellow in the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars grand prize winner, is the author of one previous novel, Sleight, and six poetry collections: Unfathoms, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, The Dottery, Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer, Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press), and AutoPortrait (as flotsam).

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