Rome, p.6
Rome, page 6
But a man who killed me
Now I am in a dirty arena
With no other human
The sun has snow on it
They bring up cats, bears, a rodent
And I kill them all
Even the two-headed beast with the snake for tail
And fanned crown
Is dead
It’s easy to kill
They bring up my own dead body
Propped over with dead desire
And I kill it
They bring up my daughter
Her wolf eyes
A sign of recognition and with my hand on her neck
I say goodbye
Never bringing you up
You already went home five years ago
And sleep so quietly and soundly
With your family and frankincense
And your Christianity and Christmases
And bursting silver buckles
This isn’t about you
This was and has always been about
The real
Bloody and awful
Twisting and twisting
Love is a strange dance
I do with myself
But I won’t give it up
Renting a car two thousand years later
To go driving the dark streets
Full of ghosts
Classic nitrogen and the dogs in the distance
One of those ghosts I know, lover
Will be you
And when I find that ghost
Only you know
Only we know
What we will do with it
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the following editors of the following publications who included poems from this book in earlier forms: Academy of American Poets; American Poetry Review; BODY; Boston Review; Clinic Presents; Forklift, Ohio; Granta; Gulf Coast; Harvard Advocate; Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations; Phantom Limb; Poetry; Poetry Northwest; Paris Review; and Tin House. Thank you to Black Ocean for including “Depression” in their Private Policy! anthology and thank you to Literary House Press for including the poem “You think language is silly until it happens to you” in their The Book of Scented Things: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dorothea Lasky is the author of Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, and is also the coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry. She is an assistant professor of poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.
ALSO BY DOROTHFA LASKY
Thunderbird
Black Life
AWE
Open the Door: How to Excite Young
People About Poetry (coedited with Dominic Luxford
and Jesse Nathan)
Poetry Is Not a Project
Praise for ROME
“Dorothea Lasky’s ROME is 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, author of Life on Mars
“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, author of The Cloud Corporation
“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, author of Bluets
“ROME is 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, author of Come and See
“Maybe there’s something in the water. Maybe there’s something not in the water. Either way, it’s uncanny how St. Louis turns out major poets. One of the most recent examples is Lasky, who’s wowed with each new collection. Her fourth, ROME, alludes to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton but also Catullus, Horace, and Drake. At its center is blood heartbreak, but as poet Timothy Donnelly observes, these poems are not weepy but instead ‘boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human’—not to mention hilarious.”
—Stefene Russell, St. Louis Magazine
“[Lasky] is poetry’s golden mean between radical and legible, romantic and classical, interpersonal and impersonal: in other words, she is uniquely poised to transcend the poetry wars. . . . [ROME] is a major achievement in which Lasky shows that she can be sincere and ironic, confessional and ambiguous.”
—Felix Bernstein, Hypoallergenic
“As fall got seriously cold, I started reading Dorothea Lasky’s new poetry collection, ROME, about lust and dissolution, and reckoning with what language can do for either one, and—brilliantly—Diet Mountain Dew. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you: ‘And what is not / Well I’ll never know / I will quench the thirst of my stomach / And eat the bitter doughnuts / Under the blank sky.’ I read her poems on a crowded 4 train during rush hour and still felt completely immersed—which says something about her voice.”
—Leslie Jamison, The Millions
“[A] book of poems that is rife with hurt, but also sparkles with linguistic virtuosity.”
—Bruce Whiteman, Hudson Review
“Many of the devastating, deft poems in Lasky’s new collection begin with an unassuming quip or comment. . . . The humor is a deceptive hook, however, because the musings quickly turn inward and are often self-eviscerating. Throughout this shattering volume, Lasky manages the rare poetic feat of exploring nihilism without self-pity. Echoes of Sylvia Plath are balanced by others of Adrienne Rich and Heather McHugh. Walt Whitman lurks in here somewhere, too.”
—Carolyn Alessio, Booklist
“Lasky’s poetry stabs its subject and spears its reader; it is sharp-edged and sinister; it glows. . . . Lasky pens verse that is both bracing in its newness and luminous in its capacity to reveal strength intrinsic to the forms she references. . . . As in the case of Homer’s fallen warriors in The Iliad who, in death, begin to look like red poppies weighed down by their seeds, Lasky too, allows strange flowers to bloom out of her battlefields—from forceful recombinations come moments of redemptive beauty, and of joy.”
—Isabel Ortiz, Feministing
Copyright © 2014 by Dorothea Lasky
All rights reserved
First published as a Liveright paperback 2016
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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Book design by Lovedog Studio
Production manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Lasky, Dorothea, 1978–
[Poems. Selections]
ROME : poems / Dorothea Lasky. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-87140-939-3 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3612.A858A6 2014
811’.6—dc23
2014025222
ISBN 978-0-87140-940-9 (e-book)
ISBN 978-1-63149-141-2 (pbk.)
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Dorothea Lasky, Rome
