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Black Life
You are born and it is to a black life
Full of abuse and strange things . . .
In her second collection of poetry, 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.
Full of abuse and strange things . . .
In her second collection of poetry, 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.
- GenresPoetry
77 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
July 12, 2010
This just arrived today and I wasn't supposed to be reading poetry. I was supposed to be arguing about money on the telephone. But I'm glad I took the break and read the poems. I can argue about money later. This money's better.
The truth is, I simply couldn't stop. Once you step on a train, you don't get off the train until it stops. Well maybe you do, but I don't. I'm a little sentimental about my bones.
As powerful as AWE was, this book is a major ramp-up.
The poems are sometimes deliciously cocky. The poet's got total swag and knows it (she even has a great poem about the "playuh" archetype, but that one turns quickly and stilettos the reader).
You can do the "Say my name, say my name" thing if you're giving the reader the goods...
"Say it
That's Love and Awe.
There is nothing better.
Or if there is
Then I don't care."
Ay Mami. Ay Papi.
Could Lasky be a rapper who slipped in under the wire? She does have a Puffy poem too, but I'm not sure it's the same Puffy. Although he is wearing a white coat.
But there's major detournement going on when she uses these tactics. Role reversal in the sex club.
Is Lasky talking about an orgy in the following lines here? If so, what a great way to describe what's really happening!
"All of us so millennial in our exacting pulchritude
Piling on top of each other, no longer one author amnong many
But one author as many
One author as full of everything
Of many as a grand God
Would be at the time of the apocalypse
Of the great judgment."
The perhaps not-so-strange forms the search for spirituality takes in today's world are all through here.
Perhaps the orgy is not an orgy. Perhaps it's the search for love through sexual desire in our lives seen in the fourth dimension of time. That too could offer a workable read of those lines.
Sex has a lot of lines in this play. But love comes first in this collection. Love is reverenced. It's so good you turn back to it even after it's gone. Just like poetry.
Lasky writes poems so intimate that some might wonder at her delicous brazenness. Sometimes she's a beautiful mess. And that's something we haven't had in poetry for a while. It's why we keep digging out the O'Hara. Not many gay poets today are a beautiful mess. Well, the guys anyway. Or they won't share it if they are. That MFA can be like a boulder on the tongue, I guess. So it's nice that Lasky exists. To help "the gays" with the drama we're sorta missing in AmPo lately. Lasky is here to bring the drama.
People say you can't do confessional poetry anymore. Well, you can do confessional poetry if you can write like this. If you can't, I agree, don't do it. Because you will only be airing dirty laundry. You will be a laundress. And that's a very nineteenth century thing to be.
The first thing Lasky is is honest. The second thing Lasky is is perceant. The third thing Lasky is is flammable. There are a lot more "is is" things, but I'll let you discover them.
"The people
They only ever believed in their own similar bodies
They only ever believed in the things that were similar
They only ever believed in the cold"
What poets come to mind as Lasky's peers? Lots. Plath. Myles. Sappho. Rukeyser. But I am segregating. Frank O'Hara. Oh, great declamatory poets like say Mayakovsky or Esenin. Dorothea Lasky's poems are often in declamatory mode, and that in itself is exceedingly refreshing. That's usually considered such a non-American thing, the declamatory. Well Ginsberg was a notable exception. Russians do that better, right? Exception alert! Why do poets so often avoid this direct mode of address? You have to have chutzpah and nerves of steel, okay. That might explain some of it. I don't think you have to be Jewish though. Lots of non-Jews have taken degrees in chutzpah.
I'd put the strongest emphasis on the Myles and the Rukeyser there, since the feminism is of the variety where the poetry is so rich that to call it merely feminist would be condescending--but to miss it would be obtuse. The same was true of her Awe.
"I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when you turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that have ever been written
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best
That is because I am a politican
That I do it this way"
She reminds me of Prevert a lot too. They both have that inalienable directness and in-it-ness. Sorry, that hyphenate doesn't exist. But it's what came to mind.
Her relationship to God continues to be interesting. It's certainly not a simple relationship. It's closer to the sort of relationship Anne Sexton had with God--or William Blake. The remote control keeps clicking. Off/On. Mostly On.
I think it's classic that she started her "Ars Poetica" with the line "I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me."
"I Don't Remember the Talk of Men" is pure Sappho.
Here's just the beginning of that...
"I don't remember the words of men that talk
I don't remember the words of men who have led me
From beach to bed
I don't remember the talk of men, their bitter talk
I don't remember the bitter lemons that have left
The talk of men
I don't remember the bitter lemons
I don't remember"
"I Love a Mathematician" is pure Sappho...
"Oh how I would identify with the sickly nature of love
And sweet sticky kisses
That never go away."
Do yourself a favor and pick this book up.
Pick up more WAVE BOOKS too.
It's one of the best we have.
The truth is, I simply couldn't stop. Once you step on a train, you don't get off the train until it stops. Well maybe you do, but I don't. I'm a little sentimental about my bones.
As powerful as AWE was, this book is a major ramp-up.
The poems are sometimes deliciously cocky. The poet's got total swag and knows it (she even has a great poem about the "playuh" archetype, but that one turns quickly and stilettos the reader).
You can do the "Say my name, say my name" thing if you're giving the reader the goods...
"Say it
That's Love and Awe.
There is nothing better.
Or if there is
Then I don't care."
Ay Mami. Ay Papi.
Could Lasky be a rapper who slipped in under the wire? She does have a Puffy poem too, but I'm not sure it's the same Puffy. Although he is wearing a white coat.
But there's major detournement going on when she uses these tactics. Role reversal in the sex club.
Is Lasky talking about an orgy in the following lines here? If so, what a great way to describe what's really happening!
"All of us so millennial in our exacting pulchritude
Piling on top of each other, no longer one author amnong many
But one author as many
One author as full of everything
Of many as a grand God
Would be at the time of the apocalypse
Of the great judgment."
The perhaps not-so-strange forms the search for spirituality takes in today's world are all through here.
Perhaps the orgy is not an orgy. Perhaps it's the search for love through sexual desire in our lives seen in the fourth dimension of time. That too could offer a workable read of those lines.
Sex has a lot of lines in this play. But love comes first in this collection. Love is reverenced. It's so good you turn back to it even after it's gone. Just like poetry.
Lasky writes poems so intimate that some might wonder at her delicous brazenness. Sometimes she's a beautiful mess. And that's something we haven't had in poetry for a while. It's why we keep digging out the O'Hara. Not many gay poets today are a beautiful mess. Well, the guys anyway. Or they won't share it if they are. That MFA can be like a boulder on the tongue, I guess. So it's nice that Lasky exists. To help "the gays" with the drama we're sorta missing in AmPo lately. Lasky is here to bring the drama.
People say you can't do confessional poetry anymore. Well, you can do confessional poetry if you can write like this. If you can't, I agree, don't do it. Because you will only be airing dirty laundry. You will be a laundress. And that's a very nineteenth century thing to be.
The first thing Lasky is is honest. The second thing Lasky is is perceant. The third thing Lasky is is flammable. There are a lot more "is is" things, but I'll let you discover them.
"The people
They only ever believed in their own similar bodies
They only ever believed in the things that were similar
They only ever believed in the cold"
What poets come to mind as Lasky's peers? Lots. Plath. Myles. Sappho. Rukeyser. But I am segregating. Frank O'Hara. Oh, great declamatory poets like say Mayakovsky or Esenin. Dorothea Lasky's poems are often in declamatory mode, and that in itself is exceedingly refreshing. That's usually considered such a non-American thing, the declamatory. Well Ginsberg was a notable exception. Russians do that better, right? Exception alert! Why do poets so often avoid this direct mode of address? You have to have chutzpah and nerves of steel, okay. That might explain some of it. I don't think you have to be Jewish though. Lots of non-Jews have taken degrees in chutzpah.
I'd put the strongest emphasis on the Myles and the Rukeyser there, since the feminism is of the variety where the poetry is so rich that to call it merely feminist would be condescending--but to miss it would be obtuse. The same was true of her Awe.
"I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when you turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that have ever been written
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best
That is because I am a politican
That I do it this way"
She reminds me of Prevert a lot too. They both have that inalienable directness and in-it-ness. Sorry, that hyphenate doesn't exist. But it's what came to mind.
Her relationship to God continues to be interesting. It's certainly not a simple relationship. It's closer to the sort of relationship Anne Sexton had with God--or William Blake. The remote control keeps clicking. Off/On. Mostly On.
I think it's classic that she started her "Ars Poetica" with the line "I wanted to tell the veterinary assistant about the cat video Jason sent me."
"I Don't Remember the Talk of Men" is pure Sappho.
Here's just the beginning of that...
"I don't remember the words of men that talk
I don't remember the words of men who have led me
From beach to bed
I don't remember the talk of men, their bitter talk
I don't remember the bitter lemons that have left
The talk of men
I don't remember the bitter lemons
I don't remember"
"I Love a Mathematician" is pure Sappho...
"Oh how I would identify with the sickly nature of love
And sweet sticky kisses
That never go away."
Do yourself a favor and pick this book up.
Pick up more WAVE BOOKS too.
It's one of the best we have.
April 13, 2011
I've just reread this book. How do I say that Dorothea Lasky is one of the best poets I know? I guess I just did. She is. She is one of those poets who will destroy you in one sitting. One of the things I LOVE about knowing her as a person is that her poems ESPECIALLY THESE POEMS HERE do not at all reflect the person you meet. In person, as a woman, as a poet, as a citizen, is fun, funny, loving, in person, as a person. But these poems are her dark truth, these poems hold your eyeball to the flame and she never hears you call uncle no matter how loud!
There are MANY exciting examples of what I mean. Here is one where you find the darkness surrounding the call to LIVE, like a keening at the grave, the inevitable grave: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poet...
This book is a masterpiece. The people who gave this less than 5 stars, I think I hate you.
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
There are MANY exciting examples of what I mean. Here is one where you find the darkness surrounding the call to LIVE, like a keening at the grave, the inevitable grave: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poet...
This book is a masterpiece. The people who gave this less than 5 stars, I think I hate you.
CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com
June 18, 2018
I’ve been slowly reading Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life for the last six or so weeks, looking forward to the time each night just before bed when I crawl into bed, & turn on the night-light to lap up a few of her poems before the book falls onto my face, and I turn into sleep. Sometimes I am lying there next to my husband, and I will be giggling, or saying I can’t believe she did that or holy shit, and my husband will say, okay, let me read it, so I will pass him her book and point to the poem titled “Mike I had an Affair,” which begins
Mike, I had an affair
With Jakob Tushinea, the poet
and goes on with
I peered into his crevices
And upon his bed I peered into more
Like the kind of things that the monsters make.
He was a monster, no
He was not a monster, Mike
His skin was soft and wild
And when he smiled
I was a bit on fire
and my husband goes, wow, that’s pretty funny, and I go, but listen to this, I don’t know what to make of it? Is she serious? & recite from “It Feels Like Love”:
When he and I are together, it just feels like love
And when we are talking and laughing together
It feels like love …
And his eyes on me and the way he looks
And what he says and the way I feel
I mean, if one of my students turned this in, I would give him or her un petite impromptu lecture-ette on specific nouns and verbs, on getting past banal generalities, but maybe that’s Lasky’s gift: she sticks a poem like this in her book, and suddenly we remember being in high school, being a newbie poet, and writing this kind of drivel, and it reminds us (okay, sorry, ME) of Richard Brautigan’s The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, those lovely (sappy but also kookie/quirky) love poems of his.
I love this book because one minute Lasky’s speaker is plainly and flatly jotting down her high-school-diary-entry retorts (“Atheists are all over the world and they are such idiots”) and the next she is Sappho, Neruda, O’Hara, and Breton all wrapped up into one (“Like a carrot I will be everything God can’t see). I also love that this is a speaker who goes down on her boss, loves a mathematician, and because she writes, in “Poem to My Ex-Husband,”
Dear husband, I tried to write you an email
But I didn’t have the right address
My husband, I love you so much
Will you be mine forever
I know you are married now
Does that matter
I can still remember holding hands
I bought a purse …
And then we got a car together
And then it was over
My sweet baby you were always there
You always
Loved me, in the shower you would bathe me
And feed me later in bed spaghetti or something else…
That “or something else” is what gives her away, along with the spaghetti, of course. This is how we know she is not truly an awful poet writing drivel, writing a treacle-tart- wielding hack, but a smart chick who has studied her Sapphics and those sweet Chilean odes, as in, later on in this poem:
I will haunt you even when I am dead
I will wear plastic horseshoes on my ghostly suit …
Your gesture will be my gesture …
I place your moving mouth next to a red drill
And together we got to someplace like a beach
Where they give us things we need, like life.
Again, note: someplace like a beach. Yet another giveaway Lasky’s playing with the notion of the love-sick teenager writing her first poems about unrequited loves and how she will stroll down with her beloved to watch a sunset on the pier, but in this case the gig’s up as we’re not given a beach but a stock image that could or might be a beach, but could also be a mountain sunset, or any other number of “likes” listed in a Match.com profile.
Black Life is about, among other things, death (her father has died), love lack, impermanence, being eaten by flames, the search for identity and acceptance of one’s past selves (“I was once so sexless in the midst of love / When I was young / And was not sticky with a thousand men”), the sun, rotting, and whether the speaker is rotting or water, “a watery nymph that is hot and wet / Like a wetted beast”—whether she is the sun, God is the sun, or god is a black bird—and it is also a great poem of the bragging poet who says
You are reading the work of a great poet, possi-
bly one of the greatest ones of your time.
But don’t read this book for what it is about. Read it for the cool, cool ways she juxtaposes the mundane with the miraculous, heightened language with the flattest of flatland (southern Nebraska?) prose/bad, bad poetry you can’t even call poetry because it could have been written by a ninny like your own 15-year old self, such as
I am just so very sad
such as
But a nightmare you can’t get out of because it is the night
That is all encompassing
I get all encompassed by the night every day
such as (has Lasky’s speaker ever heard of Louis Armstrong? Has she ever heard Tony Bennett and k.d. laing do their tear-inducing rendition of “What a Wonderful World?”)
There are children playing around you. They know more than you will ever know.
I haven’t gotten this stuck on a book of poetry since, let me see, probably Natasha Saje’s Red Under the Skin or Aimee Nezhukamatathil’s Miracle Fruit. I mean, I am some kind of smitten. In fact, I find myself wanting to make a table of flat lines and o so incredibly leaping, surprising, high-wire act lines, so please let me indulge myself:
Flat
I like to think / About things that are nice / And Pretty
Wow
My heart belongs to a lion / I love his pelt and covet his heart.
Flat
What people don’t understand about being a genius is / Is that it is hard
Wow
Whoever those postmodernists are that say / There is no universal have never spent any time with an animal
Flat
The sunshine on your face and neck
Wow
Because I know the inside of your face
Flat
I have been a lot of places / Most of them in my mind
Wow
Mathematical laundress / of the forgotten egret
Flat
I am sick of feeling
Wow
When you are in the grave all that you will be able to say is mommy.
Maybe it’s fascination tinged with nostalgia. Reading these poems, I am twelve and peeking into my sister’s diary. She is fourteen and is having sex. I do not know men have erections. She is having sex in her bedroom closet. I read, feel guilty, read some more, my eyes wide, my mouth not hanging open (because most of us don’t actually gape, do we?), but internally a kind of permanent gaping-wound sunburn, burned by her words, by that knowledge, which is the kind of black, black burning Black Life is all about.
Mike, I had an affair
With Jakob Tushinea, the poet
and goes on with
I peered into his crevices
And upon his bed I peered into more
Like the kind of things that the monsters make.
He was a monster, no
He was not a monster, Mike
His skin was soft and wild
And when he smiled
I was a bit on fire
and my husband goes, wow, that’s pretty funny, and I go, but listen to this, I don’t know what to make of it? Is she serious? & recite from “It Feels Like Love”:
When he and I are together, it just feels like love
And when we are talking and laughing together
It feels like love …
And his eyes on me and the way he looks
And what he says and the way I feel
I mean, if one of my students turned this in, I would give him or her un petite impromptu lecture-ette on specific nouns and verbs, on getting past banal generalities, but maybe that’s Lasky’s gift: she sticks a poem like this in her book, and suddenly we remember being in high school, being a newbie poet, and writing this kind of drivel, and it reminds us (okay, sorry, ME) of Richard Brautigan’s The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, those lovely (sappy but also kookie/quirky) love poems of his.
I love this book because one minute Lasky’s speaker is plainly and flatly jotting down her high-school-diary-entry retorts (“Atheists are all over the world and they are such idiots”) and the next she is Sappho, Neruda, O’Hara, and Breton all wrapped up into one (“Like a carrot I will be everything God can’t see). I also love that this is a speaker who goes down on her boss, loves a mathematician, and because she writes, in “Poem to My Ex-Husband,”
Dear husband, I tried to write you an email
But I didn’t have the right address
My husband, I love you so much
Will you be mine forever
I know you are married now
Does that matter
I can still remember holding hands
I bought a purse …
And then we got a car together
And then it was over
My sweet baby you were always there
You always
Loved me, in the shower you would bathe me
And feed me later in bed spaghetti or something else…
That “or something else” is what gives her away, along with the spaghetti, of course. This is how we know she is not truly an awful poet writing drivel, writing a treacle-tart- wielding hack, but a smart chick who has studied her Sapphics and those sweet Chilean odes, as in, later on in this poem:
I will haunt you even when I am dead
I will wear plastic horseshoes on my ghostly suit …
Your gesture will be my gesture …
I place your moving mouth next to a red drill
And together we got to someplace like a beach
Where they give us things we need, like life.
Again, note: someplace like a beach. Yet another giveaway Lasky’s playing with the notion of the love-sick teenager writing her first poems about unrequited loves and how she will stroll down with her beloved to watch a sunset on the pier, but in this case the gig’s up as we’re not given a beach but a stock image that could or might be a beach, but could also be a mountain sunset, or any other number of “likes” listed in a Match.com profile.
Black Life is about, among other things, death (her father has died), love lack, impermanence, being eaten by flames, the search for identity and acceptance of one’s past selves (“I was once so sexless in the midst of love / When I was young / And was not sticky with a thousand men”), the sun, rotting, and whether the speaker is rotting or water, “a watery nymph that is hot and wet / Like a wetted beast”—whether she is the sun, God is the sun, or god is a black bird—and it is also a great poem of the bragging poet who says
You are reading the work of a great poet, possi-
bly one of the greatest ones of your time.
But don’t read this book for what it is about. Read it for the cool, cool ways she juxtaposes the mundane with the miraculous, heightened language with the flattest of flatland (southern Nebraska?) prose/bad, bad poetry you can’t even call poetry because it could have been written by a ninny like your own 15-year old self, such as
I am just so very sad
such as
But a nightmare you can’t get out of because it is the night
That is all encompassing
I get all encompassed by the night every day
such as (has Lasky’s speaker ever heard of Louis Armstrong? Has she ever heard Tony Bennett and k.d. laing do their tear-inducing rendition of “What a Wonderful World?”)
There are children playing around you. They know more than you will ever know.
I haven’t gotten this stuck on a book of poetry since, let me see, probably Natasha Saje’s Red Under the Skin or Aimee Nezhukamatathil’s Miracle Fruit. I mean, I am some kind of smitten. In fact, I find myself wanting to make a table of flat lines and o so incredibly leaping, surprising, high-wire act lines, so please let me indulge myself:
Flat
I like to think / About things that are nice / And Pretty
Wow
My heart belongs to a lion / I love his pelt and covet his heart.
Flat
What people don’t understand about being a genius is / Is that it is hard
Wow
Whoever those postmodernists are that say / There is no universal have never spent any time with an animal
Flat
The sunshine on your face and neck
Wow
Because I know the inside of your face
Flat
I have been a lot of places / Most of them in my mind
Wow
Mathematical laundress / of the forgotten egret
Flat
I am sick of feeling
Wow
When you are in the grave all that you will be able to say is mommy.
Maybe it’s fascination tinged with nostalgia. Reading these poems, I am twelve and peeking into my sister’s diary. She is fourteen and is having sex. I do not know men have erections. She is having sex in her bedroom closet. I read, feel guilty, read some more, my eyes wide, my mouth not hanging open (because most of us don’t actually gape, do we?), but internally a kind of permanent gaping-wound sunburn, burned by her words, by that knowledge, which is the kind of black, black burning Black Life is all about.
August 8, 2013
After seeing her read a couple of times recently, I can't let go of that VOICE! I want to read everything by her now. This collection has many outstanding moments; my favorites being Fat, Poem to My Ex-Husband, I Am a Wild Band, None Of It Matters, and a poem that truly feels classic to me, It Feels Like Love, which I will pirate here from the website, Past Simple:
It feels like love
When he and I are together, it just feels like love
And when we are talking and laughing together
It feels like love
And when we are hugging and going places together
It just feels like love, it feels like love
And his eyes on me and the way he looks
And what he says and the way I feel
And the things he does and the feelings I get
And the songs that play and my mind a racing
And the Spring racing before us and the sun and moon
And the low light of the evening
With the dark trees silhouetted and the birds aflame
It just feels like love
It really does
I don’t know
I must have said it all wrong.
It feels like love
When he and I are together, it just feels like love
And when we are talking and laughing together
It feels like love
And when we are hugging and going places together
It just feels like love, it feels like love
And his eyes on me and the way he looks
And what he says and the way I feel
And the things he does and the feelings I get
And the songs that play and my mind a racing
And the Spring racing before us and the sun and moon
And the low light of the evening
With the dark trees silhouetted and the birds aflame
It just feels like love
It really does
I don’t know
I must have said it all wrong.
July 2, 2025
Top 10 most important books of my entire life probably
February 6, 2011
Dorothea Lasky’s new book, Black Life, brims with the chaos of real life and real people fighting to express themselves when shiny and happy words aren’t sufficient. A unifying component of the poems is frequent references to her father’s battle with dementia, and sprinkled among these are tiny images, made all the more terrifying for their brevity: helpless rest home patients with bald baby heads being beaten by staff. Fire as both purifier and destroyer also makes appearances in unexpected contexts.
Talking about life, she twists around the state of health into the dimensions of inner and outer well-being, with the two often in fierce juxtaposition. She muses on Emily Dickinson’s muse, on anorexia, and refers to pop culture as freely as old boyfriends and husbands. Her voice alters from that of a hyperactive teen to a stalker to an overly-kind ghost. In all of it, she is seldom quiet or sedate.
In frequent references to poetry, she contrasts the kinds of poetry that exist: pretty and intangible or ugly and real. Therein, she makes it appear that it would be worse to be ignored than blasphemed, and that flowery prose often hides an uncertain intent. From “I Am a Politician”,
I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when I turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that
Have ever been written.
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best...
She doesn’t hide from revealing insecurity, such that her poems often appear inspired by it. In “I Just Feel So Bad”, she expresses both loneliness as well as the concept of needing pain in order to function, trying to understand what she has to give and what she can take when thinking “nice” thoughts doesn’t work. Her answer is in the final phrases:
I have no home
No bread
I am destitute
But inside me
Is a little voice
That must speak
It gets louder when you listen
"ARS Poetica” has a kinesthetic energy to it, almost as if it's the adverbs that matter most...being whatever needs being, but in a big way.
There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I only feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point
The collection is varied and intense. Being about a decade older than Lasky, there were mental moments when I wanted to tell her to relax a bit and slow down. To realize that not all problems will be resolved as quickly as we'd like, but that it's okay to wait them out. The vivid descriptions and staccato action at times felt like it was too edgy to get close to, like the wild person at the party who gets the attention and the laughs but who is terrifying to be alone with for more than a moment.
Talking about life, she twists around the state of health into the dimensions of inner and outer well-being, with the two often in fierce juxtaposition. She muses on Emily Dickinson’s muse, on anorexia, and refers to pop culture as freely as old boyfriends and husbands. Her voice alters from that of a hyperactive teen to a stalker to an overly-kind ghost. In all of it, she is seldom quiet or sedate.
In frequent references to poetry, she contrasts the kinds of poetry that exist: pretty and intangible or ugly and real. Therein, she makes it appear that it would be worse to be ignored than blasphemed, and that flowery prose often hides an uncertain intent. From “I Am a Politician”,
I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when I turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that
Have ever been written.
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best...
She doesn’t hide from revealing insecurity, such that her poems often appear inspired by it. In “I Just Feel So Bad”, she expresses both loneliness as well as the concept of needing pain in order to function, trying to understand what she has to give and what she can take when thinking “nice” thoughts doesn’t work. Her answer is in the final phrases:
I have no home
No bread
I am destitute
But inside me
Is a little voice
That must speak
It gets louder when you listen
"ARS Poetica” has a kinesthetic energy to it, almost as if it's the adverbs that matter most...being whatever needs being, but in a big way.
There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I only feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point
The collection is varied and intense. Being about a decade older than Lasky, there were mental moments when I wanted to tell her to relax a bit and slow down. To realize that not all problems will be resolved as quickly as we'd like, but that it's okay to wait them out. The vivid descriptions and staccato action at times felt like it was too edgy to get close to, like the wild person at the party who gets the attention and the laughs but who is terrifying to be alone with for more than a moment.
June 7, 2019
I disagreed aesthetically with this book. One of the poems is called "I Hate Irony." I love irony! At least, I find it an extremely useful if not inevitable capability of language. Hating irony is like hating salt.
Ironically, "I Hate Irony" is one of the better poems. It is persuasive and forceful and eloquent. The poems I liked the most in this book are, like "I Hate Irony," about poetry. The "Ars Poetica" around the middle of the book is great, as is the lone prose poem, "The Poetry that Is Going to Matter After You Are Dead," which says, "You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time." If you say so!
There is a rawness to the poems that can sometimes feel thrilling in its boldness. Other times, it just seem unedited. Look at these lines from the first poem, "The Legend of Good John Henry," which begins in a nursing home:
The last line here is where I really start to feel like I'm being deprived of a clearer insight. It goes beyond ambiguity into obscurity. I can get down with a no-irony, tell-it-to-me-straight approach, but a phrase like "all the possibilities of love like waiting" seems to be hiding behind abstraction, rather than using it to speak to emotion directly. And what is "bread toast"?
It just doesn't hit my ear all that great, is all I'm really trying to say, and this is the case with many passages in the book. I could believe that I was reading the work of a great poet, but I didn't always believe I was reading great poems.
Ironically, "I Hate Irony" is one of the better poems. It is persuasive and forceful and eloquent. The poems I liked the most in this book are, like "I Hate Irony," about poetry. The "Ars Poetica" around the middle of the book is great, as is the lone prose poem, "The Poetry that Is Going to Matter After You Are Dead," which says, "You are reading the work of a great poet, possibly one of the greatest ones of your time." If you say so!
There is a rawness to the poems that can sometimes feel thrilling in its boldness. Other times, it just seem unedited. Look at these lines from the first poem, "The Legend of Good John Henry," which begins in a nursing home:
I feed them, the rabbits and the dogs
I feed the babies bread toast, they are bald and wild
And strung out on life, the little igloos
Of their heads only cold when you think of all the possibilities of love like waiting
The last line here is where I really start to feel like I'm being deprived of a clearer insight. It goes beyond ambiguity into obscurity. I can get down with a no-irony, tell-it-to-me-straight approach, but a phrase like "all the possibilities of love like waiting" seems to be hiding behind abstraction, rather than using it to speak to emotion directly. And what is "bread toast"?
It just doesn't hit my ear all that great, is all I'm really trying to say, and this is the case with many passages in the book. I could believe that I was reading the work of a great poet, but I didn't always believe I was reading great poems.
February 13, 2011
Black Life is a daring book. A book that makes you want to talk, argue, contradict. Because it is written in such an imperative, self-assertive tone that kind of challengues you. It makes you think. It gets you angry. It makes you sad. And happy. But, overall, it makes you think a lot. It doesn't sound self-confessional or self-pity even when the author is talking about herself. So, for me, a book that raises dialogue, that makes you think, and has beautiful verses (and Black Life does) deserves 5 stars.
February 23, 2010
This is one of the best books I have ever read in my whole life. Dorothea Lasky is the Notorious B.I.G. of the poetry world. "All poetry that matters today has feelings in it" / "Whatever you do don't feel anything at all."
May 24, 2012
Absolutely one of my favorite poetry collections. Raw and unexpected with clear language. I'm truly inspired to drop my inhibitions and write with the same honesty. Dorothea Lasky is funny even when she is trying not to be - because living is funny.
April 20, 2014
This is a terrifying, sad, and powerful collection. Dorothea Lasky writes without any pretense or any of the embellishments or rationalizations we train ourselves to believe in adulthood. The result is some dark music.
August 18, 2010
my favorite new poet.
February 20, 2011
I preferred AWE.
February 1, 2011
beautiful book
March 25, 2013
a voice of humility and wisdom. humane.
April 8, 2013
"Oh but Dottie, you say, you are so funny
Surely you realize you are always being ironic
But I am not, I will tell you
I am only being real"
Surely you realize you are always being ironic
But I am not, I will tell you
I am only being real"
October 24, 2011
Poetry about poetry that's actually personal, forthright, and unafraid.
February 4, 2014
this book officially means everything to me.
July 28, 2015
This book is gorgeous.
September 19, 2018
Less distilled than Thunderbird, whose pain and joy are perhaps more mature, if I'm qualified to say. The poet says here that her favourite poet is Sylvia Plath, and but of course. I feel I'm ready to say Thunderbird surpasses Ariel, alongside being a brilliant companion piece thereto. I was hoping to see how she got to the point of writing her next collection, and this is obviously written by the same author, but that other is also probably, as I believe it is said, a total work, in that the missing link is, wholly personally, void. Likely I will still read Awe, and soon. I am afraid to read her later work, for its apparent subject matter, but I nevertheless will, for I love her so. There's something very lovable about seeing somebody smash their own face in with a ball-peen hammer.
October 21, 2024
from Poem to My Ex-Husband: "My husband, I love you so much / Will you be mine forever / I know you are married now / Does that matter"
from Things: "I once threw six lover letters out the window of a moving car / And the love they belonged to I was never quite taken with enough to lose / Kisses I threw out to children because I love them / Love children in that they are the fire of the world that keep breathing"
from The Body: "Eric says all my dreams are in my body / All my bad dreams / About betrayal / I don't want to be in this body anymore / That holds all the betrayal of the universe"
from Things: "I once threw six lover letters out the window of a moving car / And the love they belonged to I was never quite taken with enough to lose / Kisses I threw out to children because I love them / Love children in that they are the fire of the world that keep breathing"
from The Body: "Eric says all my dreams are in my body / All my bad dreams / About betrayal / I don't want to be in this body anymore / That holds all the betrayal of the universe"
October 30, 2019
More 3.5. Really witty and wonderful but often not my vibe.
March 2, 2021
exceptional poetry
September 14, 2012
I came across Dorothea Lasky's newer poems in some literary magazines and noticed her interesting voice, so I bought her 'most recent' book at that time and wanted to how her work could be read as a collection. I have to say this book is disappointing and I am even tempted to say the poet may be over-rated because WAVE usually publishes poets carefully chosen. The first reason why I can't make myself love the book is that the linebreaks are boring. The poet has decided to abandon the use of punctuation in occasions and cut the lines according to the conventional syntax. Some lines therefore are stronger than others and the energy is easily inconsistent throughout the piece (not to mention there's a lot of excess to be cut). Secondly, a number of poems in the first half of the book resort easily to the process of writing itself. This narrative strategy is not earned and make the poems too conscious of the presence of the poet. This also explains why nearly all poems are written with the first person point of view. The over-presence of the "I" tires the readers with a voice that always drowns in self-absorption. One of the worst poems in the book is "Ever Read a Book Called AWE?" (which alludes to the poet's earlier poetry collection).
Lasky's poetic style is easy to predict. The lines run in the mechanism of denials. Very often the poet says one thing, and immediately denies it. This ambiguity sometimes works, but more often not. There are also words I find nearly present in all poems, besides, as I mentioned before, the powerful "I": "love", "but", "because", "not".
The voice in the book is desperate to be heard and loved. However, there is not enough weight in her work. I do like a few poems from the book and they include "Fat" (the ending is a let down though), "Emily D", "The Devil and the Infinite Night", "Black Life", "I am a Politician", "I Don't Remember the Talk of Mne" (because of its playful lyrical nature, which I'd love to see more).
Lasky's poetic style is easy to predict. The lines run in the mechanism of denials. Very often the poet says one thing, and immediately denies it. This ambiguity sometimes works, but more often not. There are also words I find nearly present in all poems, besides, as I mentioned before, the powerful "I": "love", "but", "because", "not".
The voice in the book is desperate to be heard and loved. However, there is not enough weight in her work. I do like a few poems from the book and they include "Fat" (the ending is a let down though), "Emily D", "The Devil and the Infinite Night", "Black Life", "I am a Politician", "I Don't Remember the Talk of Mne" (because of its playful lyrical nature, which I'd love to see more).
December 24, 2010
looking at the table of contents of black life made me feel like this collection might really appeal to me as if i could return to it whenever i felt just as sad-lonely-scared as dorothea lasky seems in these poems. i love these select titles, which promise resonance or something.
- "Two doors to hell"
- "When you want to read, you can't read"
- "How to survive in this world"
- "It feels like love"
- "Some sort of truth"
- "I am a wild band"
- "Very Vivid and Horrible Dreams"
- "Sad"
- "It's a lonely world"
- "I hate irony"
- "Poets, you are eager"
- "The Poetry that is going to matter after you are dead"
- "I just feel so bad"
- "None of it matters"
- "You are not dead"
these poems remind me of poetry by tao lin, ellen kennedy, eileen myles, and so on. i like it sometimes. here, they did not quite resonate with me. i don't know how to explain why yet.
- "Two doors to hell"
- "When you want to read, you can't read"
- "How to survive in this world"
- "It feels like love"
- "Some sort of truth"
- "I am a wild band"
- "Very Vivid and Horrible Dreams"
- "Sad"
- "It's a lonely world"
- "I hate irony"
- "Poets, you are eager"
- "The Poetry that is going to matter after you are dead"
- "I just feel so bad"
- "None of it matters"
- "You are not dead"
these poems remind me of poetry by tao lin, ellen kennedy, eileen myles, and so on. i like it sometimes. here, they did not quite resonate with me. i don't know how to explain why yet.
May 11, 2010
I really loved her first book of poems, but this one just felt so...well...self-involved. I really appreciate the strangeness and unexpected images, but when an author actually includes this in their writing, I think they've gone too far:
"I don't get my poems published and then I do"
or
"Have you ever read a book called Awe?
I have. I wrote it. That's my book."
(the whole poem is about her first book and people reading it.)
"I don't get my poems published and then I do"
or
"Have you ever read a book called Awe?
I have. I wrote it. That's my book."
(the whole poem is about her first book and people reading it.)
June 2, 2011
Dorothea Lasky is of the dead-pan, ain't-no-irony-round-here-Uhnt-uh school of American pop surrealism. That is, she asks us not to take as seriously as she does her literary savvy; a wry hyperbolist and a loose talker, she won't cop to the areas of exposure in subject matter suggested in her poems' poker face. I think it's possible to enjoy this without wanting to claim for it anything more than a mandarin taste.
October 12, 2014
The poems in Black Life are conversational and confessional. Some might even say self indulgent. I would be one of those people.
When one of your poems is called "Ever Read a Book called AWE?" and AWE was your last book before this one? Yeah. That's when I begin to think perhaps you take yourself far too seriously. A big disappointment for me.
When one of your poems is called "Ever Read a Book called AWE?" and AWE was your last book before this one? Yeah. That's when I begin to think perhaps you take yourself far too seriously. A big disappointment for me.
October 2, 2011
A sharp book of modern poetry that is refreshingly deeply human without being straight up narrative or confessional. Particularly loved "Two Doors to Hell", "The Legend of Good John Henry" and "How to Survive in This World".
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