Awe - Hardcover

Lasky, Dorothea

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1933517255 ISBN 13: 9781933517254

Publisher: Wave Books, 2007

Synopsis

If the book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like Awe. Dorothea Lasky is a daring truth-teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession. The secrets she tells are truths we recognize in ourselves: “Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary.”

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978. She is the author of several chapbooks and has attended Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

About this title

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author of 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). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Laurel Review, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and 6x6, among other places. She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and also has been educated at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, Columbia University, Fashion Institute of Technology, Heath Elementary School, and Munroe Center for the Arts and has done educational research at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Philadelphia Zoo, and Project Zero.

From Publishers Weekly

Most notable in this slim debut is Lasky's recurring and refreshingly un-ironic awe of God, the soul and the spirit. Amid Brazilian bikini waxes, cheating lovers and trips to the 7-Eleven, Lasky negotiates a young woman's world with true belief: Save me O Lord.../ Save me from abuse and wisdom and red hot sin. Lasky deftly handles holy subjects in an unholy, and yet never disrespectful, manner. As well, she is rather adept at topics that could lend themselves to melodrama into affecting reading, as in the 10-part prose poem, Ten Lives in Mental Illness, in which subjects such as anorexia and panic attacks are broached with a fluidity and grace. Unfortunately, uncompelling dream images and tired stream-of-consciousness musings bog down much of this work. In one poem, Lasky wonders, Maybe I will never have a baby/ No, that can't be true, out my womb/ the tiny babies of the universe will explode. In the end it is Lasky's relationship to her God that inspires her best and makes this a surprising and worthwhile read: To the fire in his heart and the fire in God/ That makes the whole world/ Thump in a beating music, heartbeats and mountains/ that makes the bluebird in the tree. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1933517255
• ISBN 13: 9781933517254
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 73