An invention of trauma-imbued art

By Kirsten Kaschock

Coffee House Press.

286 pp. $16.

In Sleight we encounter part-living, part-inanimate objects called Needs and Souls; artists who apprentice as "hands" in secluded farmhouses; a girl's imaginary friend who is her late grandfather (as a young child), and a young man perpetually clutching a heavy rock (alternating hands year by year).

An accomplished poet, scholar, and currently a doctoral fellow in dance at Temple University, Kaschock invents "sleight," in which she invests the very real menace of individual and collective trauma. The novel thus overlays fairy tale with psychological disturbance, rattling with movement. Among the master artists of sleight are sisters Clef and Lark, and brothers Marvel and Byrne. Two sleight troupes are pulled into a daring new production, [Untitled], masterminded by a rogue director named West Early.

Lark, Clef, and Clef's lover and sleightist, Kitchen, are disciplined professionals who regularly isolate their abdominals and latissimi dorsi in warm-ups, and sustain "floor burns, fishwire and fiberglass cuts" from "architectures" - flexible, transparent structures of plastic and wire. Small acrobatic troupes train with language pulled from disciplines like the Kabbalah, psychoanalysis, physics, and voodoo: "1st sefirot, fortress, sacri-fly, infold, purl."

Footnotes illustrate sleight's rituals, which include real and fictional figures from dance and philosophy. One Antonia Bugliesi (who trained, we learn, under the real-life Marie Taglioni, a noted mid-19th-century ballerina) grew the art form, "an endless, associative play," around a series of intricate drawings by an obscure Jesuit priest named Pierre Revoix in Santo Domingo.