A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart, forthcoming from LSU Press February 27th, 2026
Praise for A Red Knocking-Knocking like a Heart:
“Kate Gaskin’s A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart depicts a heart breaking and repairing in slow motion, but the most striking thing is the quality of this book’s light—sadness and grief are as bright as the sun, a mass of nuclear fusion shining with excruciating brightness into all the hurt places, filling them with love. An extraordinary collection.”—Niina Pollari, author of Path of Totality
“Entering this beautiful, heartbreaking book is like walking through a gallery dedicated to preserving the precious artifacts of a world of grievous loss. Though the poems meditate on the darkest realities, light suffuses the blackest corners of grief. These poems are given to us by a suffering yet resilient soul, whose understanding of our flowering world is generous and profound.”—Sidney Wade, author of Deep Gossip: New and Selected Poems
“A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart is a gorgeous exploration of the complexities of parenting. It’s astonishing how much beauty and pain Gaskin distills into line and form. Through still lifes and landscapes she turns moments of life into ekphrastic art. Breathtaking in their tenderness and honesty, the poems remind us how love breaks and remakes us every season.”—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal
Forever War from YesYes Books. Click here to purchase.
Praise for Forever War:
[Forever War] is a bald and unsparing collection, one where life’s tenuous nature is continuously at the forefront — from concerns about the couple’s baby and the speaker’s own body, to dying maples, to an ocean full of hunted whales. –Jim Whiteside, author of Writing Your Name on the Glass
Grounded in place, Kate Gaskin’s collection is an immersive experience — one that is rich in tenderness, vulnerability, and struggle — through the speaker’s genuine search for understanding. –Tara Ballard, author of House of the Night Watch
In an absolutely beautiful debut, Gaskin writes about relationships, violence, longing, and loneliness using arresting images that deftly pull the reader across borders from safe to hazardous territory within the landscape of her poems. –Lauren Brazeal Garza, author of Gutter
Gaskin is a master of evoking emotion through imagery and tight language. At times sparse and stunning as the winter landscape of Omaha, these poems trace the path of violence, relationships, and the distances whittled by each. A beautiful look at what calls to us and how we answer. –Kelly Grace Thomas, author of Future Tense
Kate Gaskin 