As Is

“Julia Kasdorf, thankfully, collects poems in As Is, not as a project but as an array of well-wrought individual poems. Even so, the titles of poems offer a focus on subjects such as labor and laborers, daughter as self and parent, nature as awe-inspiring as well as a sphere damaged. These poems play out with a covert lyricism (turtle/mill/initial/shell; root splay/crayfish; Castle/mussels) that echoes throughout. After all, what captivates me most is how trauma can appear so mundane: dread of walking in a particular area, raising a child, the workers’ lot. Entering her poems is entering a door open for fervent discovery and calm.”

—Kimiko Hahn, author of Foreign Bodies

Shale Play

Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields

“A collage of voices, drawing in the testimonies of activists, residents, industry lawyers, and workers. Kasdorf explores the nuances and tensions of her home state without allowing any one perspective to dominate.”
—Rosa Furneaux, Mother Jones

Field Language

The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer

Field Language presents the work of an extraordinary couple who together left the rural lifeways of their Mennonite upbringing to go “into the world” to create forms of modern art that reflected on the places and culture they came from. Published on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition devoted to the working relationship between abstract painter Warren Rohrer and his wife, poet Jane Turner Rohrer, this sumptuously illustrated book explores the Rohrers’ painting and poetry in relation to their biographies and to the nature of modernism and modernity.

Edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Christopher Reed, and Joyce Henri Robinson

Eve’s Striptease

“...a significant work by a brilliant young poet…it is a book about coming to terms with one’s sexuality and how that affects one’s place in the world. As with Sleeping Preacher, Kasdorf’s new work moves through the dichotomous worlds of rural and urban, tradition and innovation, innocence and experience.”
—The Pittsburgh Quarterly

The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life

“The practice of writing is at once spiritual and political for Kasdorf. It is a way of drawing close to the truth of her life without allowing that truth to destroy her, a way of bearing witness to the pain and truth of others, and a way of both transgressing and honoring her community, of transcending and remaining rooted in her body.”
—Religious Studies Review

Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American

“Kasdorf...has provided a fascinating analysis of Yoder’s life and work. Her book makes use of material acquired through many personal interviews with those who remember Yoder as well as his own extensive correspondence. Her analysis of his various books in light of this new research is penetrating and thought-provoking and will be of interest both as a window into the Amish community and as an insight into one man’s struggle to balance tradition with the right to intellectual liberty.”
—Library Journal