Rome

by Dorothea Lasky

Overview

“Fearlessly frank” and “unabashedly vulnerable” (Tracy K. Smith), Dorothea Lasky’s ROME confronts love and heartbreak in the modern world.

Dorothea Lasky is one of the most talented American poets of her generation. With haunting lines that “recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg” (Chicago Tribune) and influences ranging from Drake to Catullus, Lasky fuses the ancient world with the fierceness and heartbreak of everyday life. With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems keep gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of younger poets. In ROME, Lasky finds herself in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons and proving she’s “one of the very best poets we’ve got” (Maggie Nelson).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871409409
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/22/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Author of Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, and editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry, the Missouri-born Dorothea Lasky is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in the Paris Review, Poetry, and the Boston Review. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Hunters 13

Why Poetry can be Hard for Most People 15

Never Did Amount to Anything 17

Porn 19

What's Worse 21

Winter 22

I Am Eddie Murphy 24

People Do Really Bad Things 26

Horace, to the Romans 28

The Orange Flower 30

Depression 31

Diet Mountain Dew 33

You Were So Blond 35

I Just Hope I Can Sleep 36

The Roman Poets 37

The Open Sound of French 39

The Amethyst 40

Blazing Star Lodge 41

I Remember in the Morning 44

July 45

It Is Quiet 47

February 21st 48

The Empty Coliseum 55

Lilac 58

I Know There Is Another World 60

A New Reality 62

Lilac Field 63

The Groveler 66

Moving 68

The Bed 69

Once It's in the Picture 75

Poem to Florence 76

I Want to be Alive 78

The Dogs 79

You Think Language is Silly Until It Happens to You 81

Complainers 83

Sadness 84

Why is a Mouse Sad? 86

I Feel Pity 90

Georg Trakl in the Green Sun 93

To Dream 95

Wild 97

What is a Man if Not a Siphon 99

Dawn Song 102

Poem for My Friend 103

Relative Certainty 104

The Static Nature of it All 105

Palm Tree 107

The Wall Hanging I Never Noticed 108

The Rain 109

The Art Deco of the West 111

Sonnet Weather 114

I Am a Corpse 115

There Are a Million Young Men 117

If I Thought of Anything 118

The Dead Owe a Lot of Taxes 121

The End 122

There Is Nothing 124

Rome 125

Editorial Reviews

09/01/2014
Lasky (Thunderbird) opens her fourth collection with the phrase "Consume my heart" and proceeds to consume herself over the course of the book's 59 poems. From the beginning, the poems are concerned with death and self, But otherwise it's hard to see past the vague obsessions clouding the work. There is maybe a broken relationship, maybe a death, maybe depression. Each poem is concerned with pointing out that it is a poem, that the reader is holding a book of poems. The trope is occasionally interesting; "Horace, to the Romans," reaches passed the word to call out the reader for disliking poems about poetry. Unfortunately, that moment of meta-humor fades quickly and the book gets bogged down in repetition and reveling in its own melancholy. Lasky claims that people don't read poems because "speaking to the dead is not something you want to do," before turning around and saying that poems exist "Because of sound." Neither claim is really backed up in the work. Still, there are some great sensory images, as when Lasky reflects upon "the yellow light of the sun eating my face." You believe her and want to feel the same. Sadly, the book is unfocused and meanders for too long, the feelings she intends to evoke cannot get past the words on the page. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Dorothea Lasky is one of the very best poets we've got. Her poems radiate weirdness and raw power; you can feel your mind grow new folds as you read them. They lay waste to milquetoast notions of poetic longing or melancholy, and instead go in for the vibrating, bloody facts of sadness, anger, desire, bare life, all returned to us more intensely, strangely, and sometimes comedically, by her words. The line is Lasky's measure, and she wields it like an axe she's been carrying through several lifetimes, that kind of wisdom. Her ROME is huge and intrepid and perfect, a total gift."

Maggie Nelson

"Beginning with her debut, AWE, Dorothea Lasky has been perfecting a simplicity that is as learnedly classical as it is up to the moment, as panther-like in its elegance as it is, like a panther, brutal. 'In face of everything,' she warns, 'I write loud words,' but under their loudness, as in their simplicity, a great complexity of insight and feeling converges and resounds. Love, wrath, desire, happiness, sorrow, despair and even disgust—all the human affects are called on and considered here, and in elemental form, tempered only by wit (never by politeness or piety). No one else is writing poetry as boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human as Lasky's is, and ROME is her best book yet."

Timothy Donnelly

"A trip with the wheels engaged to land at every line ending, then flipped up again. A wholly open-hearted book bringing me back to Bernadette Mayer, Maureen Owen and the suffragettes. True life."

Fanny Howe

"Dark, fearlessly frank, unabashedly vulnerable and full of real live heart. In line after incantatory line, these poems catch me up, and the raw, stark truth of them holds me rapt, like a spell—something meant to console even as it chastens—and so I understand that what they are built from, and building upon, is the animating energy all true language houses. This is unforgettable work from a poet of urgent and inimitable voice."

Tracy K. Smith