Binary Stars

Dana Koster was raised in Ventura, California, and went on to earn degrees from UC Berkeley and Cornell University. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Koster's poems have appeared in EPOCH, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, and other journals. She lives in Modesto, California, with her husband and two sons, where she works as a wedding photographer.

In her debut collection Binary Stars, Dana Koster bravely scouts the fierce, alien, and surprisingly dangerous landscapes of family life and relationships. From the epigraph, ''The Moon Smells Like Burnt Gunpowder,'' we are situated in alien territory where even ''the molecules . . . [are] all wrong.'' From this sense of displacement, Koster writes--with spare and tender language--of the wild, fairy tale nature of the domestic everyday, where a father resembles a werewolf, where mothers perceive their infants as parasitic grotesques. In this extraordinary first book, lovers, mothers, children, and siblings are inextricably linked to one another--and just like binary stars, they threaten to destroy each other, as well. Koster's dark humor becomes the dark matter imbuing her poetic cosmos, which ''fills/the gaps/in the night/with seeming.''; dark matter is the medium by which ghosts, living and not, haunt this collection. --Stella Beratlis, author of Alkali Sink