Kirjahaku

Dorothea Lasky is one of the most talented American poets of her generation. With haunting lines that "recall Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg" (Chicago Tribune) and influences ranging from Drake to Catullus, Lasky fuses the ancient world with the fierceness and heartbreak of everyday life. With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems keep gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of younger poets. In ROME, Lasky finds herself in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons and proving she's "one of the very best poets we've got" (Maggie Nelson).

A poet's spacious exploration of time, memory, and art, in homage to Bernadette Mayer. A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory--ancestral, personal, and poetic--and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art. Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."

If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in ourselves: "Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary." Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978. She is the author of several chapbooks and has attended Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

You are born and it is to a black life Full of abuse and strange things ...In her brazen second collection, Dorothea Lasky cries out beyond prophecy and confession, through to an even more powerful empathy. On the verge of becoming pure substance and sensation, Black Life is emotion recollected not in tranquility, but in radically affirming intensity. I leave and I am a black life ...And I want to Be what you made me to be Dorothea Lasky is the author of three collections of poetry. Educated at the University of Massachusetts, Washington University, and Harvard University, she currently teaches at Columbia University.

"In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality, Lasky's poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be."--Julia Bloch, Bitch "The beautiful thing about Lasky, in all her work, but particularly here, is her ability to create that same sense of earnestness, the sense that she is telling you a secret."--InDigest Magazine, InDigest Picks Go, brave and gentle reader, with Dorothea Lasky to the "purple motel / where the bird lives." Go with her, as you have willingly gone down the dark passages before, with her bare-faced poems for guidance. Thunderbird's controlled rage plunges into the black interior armed with nothing but guts and Lasky's own fiery heart to light the way. Baby of air You rose into the mystical Side of things You could no longer live with us We put you in a little home Where they shut and locked the door And at night You blew out And went wandering ...Dorothea Lasky is also the author of Black Life and AWE, both from Wave Books. She lives in New York.

In her latest collection, Dorothea Lasky brings her signature style-a deeply felt and uncanny word-music-to all matters of creativity, from poetry and the invention of new language to motherhood and the production of new life. At once a personal document as it is an occult text,Milkinvestigates overused paradigms of what it means to be a creator and encapsulates its horrors and joys-setting fire to the enigma that drives the vital force that enables poems, love, and life to happen.

Constellating four central topics—ghosts, colors, animals, and bees—in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, “metaphysical I,” which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In deceptively simple language carrying profound insights directly to readers—with a sense that is at once bold and subtle—Lasky serves as an encouraging guide through the startling, sometimes dangerous, always exhilarating landscapes of feral poetic imagination.

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.