Milk

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Description

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-complete with the authors own occult drawings-,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.

Reviews

"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

"There are many such moments inMilkwhere the poet asserts her authority to complicate our understanding of metaphors logic and the symbolic images reach via rapid direct address, inexplicable numbers, the power of color. For Lasky, a poet whose perpetual present is supplied by her faith in the imagination, a poem is less obfuscated and more dimensionalized. Lasky creates a dimensionality that refuses to be flattened out by readers who insist on undisturbed rational lines of thought. She intends to perturb, disturb, disrupt, and awaken."
Nathaniel Rosenthalis,Boston Review

In Milk, Dorothea Lasky channels her electric writing into an examination of creativity and motherhood. In parts a critique and in others a celebration, Milk deftly navigates the complex relation between creator and creation, from poetry and new language to motherhood and new life.
Cassidy Foust, Lit Hub

Lasky abandons the notions of linearity and coherence, introducing possibilities of renewal out of instances of trauma by reaching for a musical phrasing all her own. . . . 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 Lasky'sMilk, anything and everything is only a turn away, whether through metaphor's web of associations or simply the poet's inexhaustible imagination. It's hallucinogenic: in these pages, individual identity falls away and, in exchange, the reader is given access to something like shared consciousness."
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal

"Laskys poems are incredibly visceral, long known for being straightforward and fearless, pushing unflinchingly through some rather dark territory. Her poems are constructed as accumulations, with phrases stacked upon another, moving further and further, heading off into directions unknown that managed somehow to exist simultaneously linked and trailing off into some unknown distance; lost, somehow, and yet connected. Part of the rollercoaster thrill of reading her poems is in seeing just where the poem might end up, often a far distance from where it might open."Rob McLennan

Exhibiting her typically unabashed, rhythmic, and confessional style, Lasky revels in both shadow and light as she writes through isolation, motherhood, and loss. At its best, Laskys voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire. . . . This is an emotionally enriching collection, and Laskys euphonic displays of vulnerability may leave readers pleasantly dizzy.
Publishers Weekly

For all the humor and sneer, Laskys poems tread the waters of stark fears of mortality, propagation, and innate monstrosity. . . . Yet, somehow, her speaker carries on through all lifes sufferingby the cosmic force of Laskys lyric and whimsy, Because despite it all / She lived / You know and so, with Milk, readers may find kaleidoscopic stories for survival too.
The Arkansas International

Author Bio

Dorothea Laskyis the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Milk (forthcoming, Wave Books, 2018),Rome(Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014),Thunderbird(Wave Books, 2012),Black Life(Wave Books, 2010), andAWE(Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including:Snakes (Tungsten Press, 2017), Thing (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012), Matter: A Picturebook(Argos Books, 2012),The Blue Teratorn(Yes Yes Books, 2012),Poetry is Not a Project(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010),Tourmaline(Transmission Press, 2008),The Hatmaker's Wife(2006),Art(H_NGM_N Press, 2005), andAlphabets and Portraits(Anchorite Press, 2004). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared inAmerican Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, POETRY, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and6x6, among other places. She is the co-editor ofOpen the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry(McSweeney's, 2013) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. 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.