Mother

By Dorothea Lasky

• Description
• Reviews

• Dorothea Lasky’s stunning new collection of poems presents an unfurling, terrifying, and fiercely loving embodiment of motherhood as a force of creation. Inspired by Bernadette Mayer’s The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, Lasky writes from the inner realm of a third pregnancy and guides us through a suspended timeline taut with anticipation. Mother documents caring for small children, the death of the mother, and the simultaneous anxiety and darkness of impending birth, as Lasky transmits from a deep mythic and biologically immediate space: “And even though I’ve spent / Eight months now / Dreading the sight / Of anything red / Now I long to bleed all over.” Invoking the eternal symbol of the mother, Lasky asks us to consider an expansive understanding of the horror and devotion inherent in the daily practices of existence. 

  
  

• Previous Praise:
  Lasky has been heralded as a Gen-X successor to confessionalism, but in The Shining, she marries a more subdued exposition with her signature Plathian confrontation... Rather than self-aggrandize or self-immolate, as in traditional confession, poetry here becomes apprentice to a larger feminist project of dismantling patriarchal power.
  Eileen G'Sell, Los Angeles Review of Books
  

  Lasky’s mischievous metaphysics are on display here. Her slippery usage of self at times recasts The Shining of King and Kubrick into a tale of complex and bruised monstrosity. Female personae evade and ignore trauma, as in “Twins” and “Blue Christmas.” They end the collection bereaved and confused, still ready to fight the spirits off, wandering the mountains and breakfast buffets looking for sensual relief. It’s not gory revenge. It’s a painful repossession.
  Heavy Feather Review

  Lasky’s distinctly feminist lens crystallizes the horrors of the infamous Overlook Hotel anew. Plumbing the contested shadows of self-image and desire, neither she nor the reader can escape “that terrible terror of being / that’s me.”
  The New York Times
  
  If the essence is not in what she says, Lasky’s poignancy is the result of subtle insights, both endearing and intuitive, suggested by what language leaves out.
  Sophie Sills, Jacket2
  

  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.
  Kristen Evans, Rain Taxi