Animal

(Paperback)

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Description

• Lasky has a devoted and energetic fanbase who are drawn to her accessible yet emotionally powerful poems.
• Lasky is, along with Alex Dimitrov, a founder and astrologer for the Astro Poets, which currently has 413K followers on twitter.
• This is a wonderful and rare insight into Laskys poetics and the ways it is informed by books, theory, film, art, and the occult.
• The simple four-topic format belies a fascinatingly interconnected thematic structure anchored by an inspiring sense of human wildness and the powers of poetic subjectivity.
• This is the third book in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series and will further articulate the series diverse approaches to poetics. The first two works in the seriesby Joshua Beckman and Terrance Hayesare gaining more and more visibility and praise, the Hayes being positively reviewed recently in the New York Times.

Reviews

"Hers is a consciousness under siege, but not at the expense of great compassion and even humor. If her poems sometimes seem like theyre yelling, its as if theyre yelling only to you, seeking whatever kinds of justice poetry can ask in the ways only poetry can."Craig Morgan Teicher,NPR

"Laskys voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire."Publishers Weekly

"A starchart of loneliness. . . . In these intensely sad poems, I feel like Im not so much gazing from Laskys 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

"Dont look for daintiness nor defeatism in Laskys weighty lines but rather fierce, quick-witted associations that make space for one womans 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

Author Bio

Dorothea Laskyis the author, most recently, of The Wild Wind in the Space of the Word, published in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series from Wave Books (Wave Books, forthcoming). She is also the author of several full-length collections of poetry, includingMilk(Wave Books, 2018),Rome(Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014),Thunderbird(Wave Books, 2012),Black Life(Wave Books, 2010), andAWE(Wave Books, 2007), and is the co-editor ofOpen the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry(McSweeney's, 2013). She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.