Description
Book SynopsisConstellating 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.
Trade Review"Hers is a consciousness under siege, but not at the expense of great compassion and even humor. If her poems sometimes seem like they’re yelling, it’s as if they’re yelling only to you, seeking whatever kinds of justice poetry can ask in the ways only poetry can."—Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
"Lasky’s voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire."—Publishers Weekly
"A starchart of loneliness. . . . In these intensely sad poems, I feel like I’m not so much gazing from Lasky’s POV but just adjacent, maybe hovering just outside her space-orbiter-cum-isolette, peering in through the double Corningware panes. Peering in at her peering out."—Joyelle McSweeney, Lana Turner
"Don’t look for daintiness nor defeatism in Lasky’s weighty lines but rather fierce, quick-witted associations that make space for one woman’s power to name her world."—Major Jackson, Academy of American Poets
"In her poetry, Dorothea Lasky does the work of naming for us, saying it as is, but in language and music that gets at the visceral and drags it, wet and sticky, to the surface. She takes power back."—Kimberly Ann Priest, NewPages
"She will force you to acknowledge the blackness of the blood pumping underneath your skin or the claustrophobia of loneliness, but she will not allow you to forget there is light, and that it can exist in knowing another person."—Rain Taxi
Table of ContentsContents
An Introduction
Poetry, Ghosts, and the Shared Imagination
What is Color in Poetry or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word
The Beast: How Poetry Makes Us Human
The Bees
Acknowledgments
