Anne
Kaier
In memoirs, essays, and poems, I write about the body. How does a woman with a disability see herself as a sexual being? I tangle with how my skin disorder, ichthyosis, has influenced my romantic life.
Honors include a mention in Best American Essays and the Propel Poetry Award (2025). NPR interviewed me about my essays that appeared in The New York Times. My memoir-in-progress is set at the University of Oxford, where I got an MA.
Photo: Suzanne Sennhenn
Just Published!
I'm proud to announce publication of my new book of poems. It won the Propel Series Award.
How Can I Say It Was Not Enough?
By Anne Kaier
A candid memoir-in-poems about family dynamics, love, and sex—in ravishing and accessible verse.
“Brutal yet gorgeous.”
—Poet Elaine Terranova,
author of Rinse.
“There is searing truth in these enthralling poems.”
— Eleanor Wilner,
2025 Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets
Now Available at:
Amazon, Bookshop.org, Syracuse University Press, or your local indie bookstore.
Finalist for the AWP's Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
I'm mighty pleased and honored that my manuscript, They Said I Couldn't Have a Love Life: A Memoir, is one of ten finalists for the 2024 Association of Writers & Writing Programs' Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction.
Read an excerpt from They Said I Couldn't Have a Love Life at the button below.
New essay published!
For a quick read about Chinese bronzes and the strangeness of life spans see below on pages 58-59:
A silent movie floats along a bare wall in a tomblike room in the National Museum of Asian Art. One day in 1929 or 1930, a slender Chinese archaeologist, his creamy sleeves rolled up to his elbows, steps into a pit, leans down, hands on his knees, greedily scrutinizing newly excavated bronze vessels. They’re from 1100-1050 BCE, unimaginably long ago.
An affable Chinese-American docent tells me about the dig in the city of Anyang, capital of the Bronze Age Shang dynasty. She motions to a ceremonial dagger glistening with a jade edge. But I’m drawn again to the strangely silent films looping on the wall. How could the archaeologist in his fedora hat be smiling and moving about in the black and white films when he’s in his own grave? How could he be dead and alive at the same time?
Photo: Lisa Braxton
I talk about how my work as a poet influences my writing of memoir.
Rosemont Writer's Retreat with Anne Kaier and moderator Carla Spataro from Main Line Television on Vimeo.
Craft interviews:
Click here to read an interview in the AWP Writer's Chronicle. I talked about disability and poetry with poets Stephen A. Kussisto, Ona Gritz, Daniel Simpson, Nathan Spoon, and Lisa Dougherty..
