Reviewed by Crystal B Stone
Flu Season
by Katie Kalisz
Cornerstone Press
April 2025, Paperback, 100 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1960329882
Katie Kalisz’s second poetry collection, Flu Season, introduces, praises, and transcends the ordinary. Think: Ross Gay meets the modern working domestic woman meets flu season after a globe-changing pandemic. She adds a woman’s touch to gratitude—a subliminal longing, a quiet addiction to wanting not more, but different. A love without the weight of responsibility to a cultural narrative that doesn’t always feel aligned with the speaker’s soul.
Kalisz domesticates the eight months of the year we suffer through the uncertainty of illness or death in Flu Season. Almost the length of a pregnancy, Flu Season carries a heaviness, a quiet longing for more. In short, narrative poems, Kalisz illuminates the experience of womanhood—in the home and the classroom—during this time of year. We see the love of a mother, wife, and teacher taking long, stolen breaks to look out the window or open a door for herself.
The devotion to love, relationships, or responsibilities isn’t quiet in her work. Kalisz writes, “Bringing / him a glass of water / feels like inventing fire.” (5) We see electricity in the mundane—a suggestion of invention from two elements we expect can’t coexist together. The speaker and her partner create together despite elemental incompatibilities and the threat of silence or boredom that long-term love is often stereotyped to bring. Love is pervasive, and predictably steady.
Still, change happens around her—frequently and quietly—even with her devotion to family and routine. These shifts are typically tied to creation or loss, and often, both at once. In “Syrup-Making,” for example, readers show up in her kitchen and learn how she creates syrup and poetry. At the end of the poem, she could have shown us a full bottle of syrup or someone pouring it on pancakes. Instead, the poem ends: “skimming the bottom, / a sugar paste / all that is / left.” (56) The spacing and the lines suggest separation, scarcity, lack. Despite creation, something’s missing—something that reemerges in the next poem’s title, “Fernweh,” which she explains is “German for a longing for distant places.” (57) Each poem is a relatable story holding both gratitude and longing sychronously in a way that feels married.
Despite a desire for change, there’s an intentional focus on the pleasures of the moments the speaker can tangibly touch. She writes, “The spray of / sawdust looks like / confetti, the only sign / of change.” (4) The most beautiful parts she describes are the present so we stay with her there joyfully avoiding flu season, keeping love alive and coloring beauty onto even the hardships.
In the poem “Searching for How to Fill the Time,” she writes, “My stockpiled time, / like the bourbon my husband sips cautiously, / is an uprising that abides by tally-taking truth.” (23) Even when fear enters, she sees that there is enough. The poem concludes, “I pour an ounce for myself, always afraid / we’ll run out.” (23) There’s no evidence of shortage—only the whisper of doubt. But the world, through her, reminds us: giving doesn’t deplete her. There is still enough. In each of these small, intentional gestures, daily acts of permission or creation, we watch her dismiss the fears that might otherwise interrupt the radiant love she and her poems embody.
About the reviewer: Crystal Stone is an English instructor at Oklahoma State University and author of seven poetry collections. Her work has appeared in various international journals including The Threepenny Review, Poetry Daily, Salamander and others. You can find more about her at her website: www.crystalbstone.com.