ROME
Poems
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
