The Shining

by Dorothea Lasky

Overview

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. 

Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781950268856
Publisher:	Wave Books
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry Milk (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 six chapbooks: 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). She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013), co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (with Alex Dimitrov, Flatiron Books, 2019) 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 Universityand Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Poetry Hates You Too

 

 

A light falls on the bitter afternoon

That half sounds like a jetliner taking off

Or sounds like all of those unfairly dismissed

To their perfectly absurd little rooms for all eternity

But I won’t dedicate this poem to them

Because the real and feminized world was made for

Their sweet countenances

Which upturn at the sight of the falling light

Which speak of nights spent in a dream

No instead I dedicate this poem

Dead and useless as it is

To the man who sits at his wooden desk

Constructing the annals

Of that conservative leaflet

No one would die for

Strumming his computer keys

Like the way he fumbles with a clitoris

Or who sits in an expansive city lawn with that pretty girl

Hoping his particulars won’t find him

Dribbling his expensive gin all over her reddening dress

This is a love poem for that man

That one who bemoans us plebians

Who value the wide swath of time

That we find ourselves in

Rather than value the academic study

Of poems that denounce emotion or real feeling

For as he sits unbuttoning a pair of purpled slacks

He will find me there eventually

Sitting with the both of them

My arm around them in the photo

Sharing a seat with them in the cab ride

While he pontificates about his money or his status

Once he reads again into the poem

That he so wildly admires

He will find me there too

Rising from the bath

Body decaying within the stanzas

That he so loves but couldn’t see fit

To publish in its own time

He may find me too

As he is taking down that tattered book

While sitting by the fire

In search of what words once moved him

And with drowsy eyes finds this poem instead

Staring back at him

With words of immense caution

To be careful of the poems you preach

Poetry I too dislike it

But I dislike him more

And I will write it until they take it

Away from me

If it means I can speak

What he never will

In defense of it

Poetry I hate you too

But little man

I hate you more

So sweet upturned faces to the sun
Make the poems be the things you give everyone
They must carry on

Table of Contents

Contents

 

Self Portrait in the Hotel

Poetry Hates You Too

Strange Humor

A Lion

High Ceilings

Old Photo

Food Court

The Gold Ballroom

Time

Jeans

The Trumpet

Marriage

Blue Christmas

Old TV

Twins

Hunger

The Mirror

Red Airplane

Vision

Rugs

Swimming Pool

Man in the Window

Red Rum

Maze

Perfume

Blue Hallway

The Bear

Snow Maze

A Lovely World

The Ax

The Green Maze

After The Party

Framed Pictures

Closing Scene

Going Through a Mountain

Editorial Reviews

Laugh, cry, or shake your head, Lasky cuts to the chase. —Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail

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

From the Publisher