Books by Dorothea Lasky

ROME: Poems

by Dorothea Lasky

A heartbreaking collection from one of the most recognized and influential new voices in American poetry. Dorothea Lasky has been hailed as "undoubtedly one of the nation's most talented younger poets" (Huffington Post). From her first book, AWE, Lasky has been crafting her hallmark voice, a mixture of language that is "boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human" (Timothy Donnelly), presenting her readers with poetry full of "blood-red realness" (Boston Globe) and haunting lines that "recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg" (Chicago Tribune). 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 have kept gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of new poets, fusing the transcendent vision of the New York School with a kind of performative confessionalism, bringing the force and power of the classical world into the everyday.
ROME, her fourth collection, marks the arrival of this seminal American poet to the classic Liveright imprint. This work finds her in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons, savaged by grief and lust. ROME is a book populated with love's proxies, its wounded animals and desiccated bodies, in league with her chosen poetic company: Catullus and Anne Sexton, Nicki Minaj and Drake. Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith writes, "Dorothea Lasky's ROME is dark, fearlessly frank, unabashedly vulnerable, and full of real live heart." In these poems of high lyricism, Lasky fuses the ancient world, with all its grandiosity and power, with the fierceness and heartbreak of our everyday world, where sometimes all a poet can do is to carry her line like a weapon in an awful blood sport––the blood jet––taking no prisoners as she slashes across a landscape of language, strange fascinations, real people, and the imagination.

ROME: Poems

by Dorothea Lasky

“Fearlessly frank” and “unabashedly vulnerable” (Tracy K. Smith), Dorothea Lasky’s ROME confronts love and heartbreak in the modern world. 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).

Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac

by Alex Dimitrov, Dorothea Lasky

From the online phenomenons the Astro Poets comes the first great astrology primer of the 21st century.

Full of insight, advice and humor for every sign in the zodiac, the Astro Poets' unique brand of astrological flavor has made them Twitter sensations. Their long-awaited first book is in the grand tradition of Linda Goodman's Sun Signs, but made for the world we live in today.

In these pages the Astro Poets help you see what's written in the stars and use it to navigate your friendships, your career, and your very complicated love life. If you've ever wondered why your Gemini friend won't let you get a word in edge-wise at drinks, you've come to the right place. When will that Scorpio texting "u up?" at 2AM finally take the next step in your relationship? (Hint: they won't). Both the perfect introduction to the twelve signs for the astrological novice, and a resource to return to for those who already know why their Cancer boyfriend cries during commercials but need help with their new whacky Libra boss, this is the astrology book must-have for the twenty-first century and beyond.

Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry

by Dorothea Lasky, Dominic Luxford, Jesse Nathan

This one-of-a-kind mixture of essays, interviews, and lesson plans gathers the best thinking about how we can impart the value and joy of poetry to kids.

The essays in the first section—from Matthea Harvey, Ron Padgett, William Stafford, Eileen Myles, Kenneth Koch, Theodore Roethke, and many others—illuminate the importance of poetry to a well-rounded education, in and out of traditional classroom settings. The next section is a roundtable conversation among a handful of creative men and women who’ve helped set up or run poetry education centers around the United States. In the book’s final segment, award-winning poets (Matthew Zapruder, Yusef Komunyakaa, many others) offer an array of brilliant lesson plans for people teaching poetry to kids of all ages.

Open the Door will be useful for first-time and veteran teachers, as well as parents, babysitters, MFAs with no job, and anyone else with an interest in poetry’s place in the lives of our younger citizens.

Milk

by Dorothea Lasky

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,Milk investigates 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.

Animal (Bagley Wright Lecture Series)

by Dorothea Lasky

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.

Thunderbird (Wave Books)

by Dorothea Lasky

"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.

Awe

by Dorothea Lasky

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.

The Shining

by Dorothea Lasky

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.