"Lasky’s 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

Dorothea Lasky is 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), and AWE (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), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, POETRY, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6x6, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open 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.

Contents

a fierce and violent opening

do you want to dip the rat

ghost flight to the moon

a hospital room

the start of the free and natural

Save your flowers

Floral pattern

Why I Hate The Internet

The miscarriage

The book of stars and the universe

The Clog

There is no name yet

Milking the rest of it

Milk, No 2

Love Poem for Bathsheba

The ghost

The Ghosts

The way we treat them

Become a person

Me and you

If you can’t trust the monitors

Hot Pink Summer Titty Tassels

Twin Peaks

OCD

Kill Marry Fuck

At night the snakes

The Dream

Little Kingdom

The School

Snakes

The Minotaur

Fuck everyone

The Secret Life of Mary Crow

You thought

Winter plums

I feel the heavy

Is it a burden

The Medical Institution

Agatha

Poem for the Moon Man

Blue milk