"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

Dorothea Lasky is 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, including Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007), and is the co-editor of Open 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.

Contents

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