Kassandra Montag is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies such as Midwestern Gothic, Nebraska Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Mystery Weekly Magazine. Her debut novel, After the Flood, has been published in fourteen languages and has been optioned for television. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska with her husband and two sons.

“In lush verse and precise imagery, the many voices that make up Chorus of the Underground Sea reveal and reflect the gravity of what it means to be a woman, a lover, a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a witch, an outcast, an artist, a muse. Kassandra Montag brilliantly embodies a multitude of voices that span the centuries, and these poems are equal parts meditation, lamentation, and celebration in their unflinching look at how, for many women, our deepest desires are almost always at odds with the lives we’ve chosen or been given.”

–Sarah McKinstry-Brown, author of This Bright Darkness

“Montag’s ability to hold the specific gravities of history alongside the ephemeral, the banal, and show how they rub against each other, inform and infect each other, is stunning. There are deep ideas at play in this book, unflinching sojourns through the shadowy interior life, and through the attachments that define us – to a lover, parent, child, to the relentless earth and to our terrifically brief appearance in its epoch.”

–Rebecca Rotert, author of Understory

“Across time and place the many voices collected in these vividly imagined and empathetic lyrics sing to us of loneliness and loss, love and survival. In ekphrastic and persona poems, whether in received or open forms, Montag recreates for us the best kind of history—intimate and unsentimental.”

–Susan Aizenberg, author of Quiet City

Chorus of the Underground Sea

Kassandra Montag
Perfect Paperback: 108 pages
ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1737924111
WSC Press (December 1, 2021)