Death of the First Idea

I’m enamored of Rickey Laurentiis’s second collection, Death of the First Idea. It is an elusive and exquisite palimpsest seeking the fore-ongoingness of sense, reborn, and feminine soundings out, daring revisions of the First Idea, reusing the body’s thorned material as Rescued Language from the threshold of the End of the World (New Orleans, you know the spot). Antiquely modern, Laurentiis’s mad and maddening syntax seduces like the changeling ritual of “wandering to belong,” singing in rhapsodic praise of crossings “between eternities” (tainted, “T’ain’t one & t’ain’t the other”). Hers is a mystical and blueprint: a spellcasting gospel of dangerous trans antecedents and black-hole privacies, of burning keys and wounds and later slower knowledges—“but, hush, come welcome Mystery, no, Baby, let’s steal away…” 

This is a generous book that revels in excess, in the mess of the self, writing thru crisis and the cries of history, from a somber reflection on traveling to the Palestine Festival of Literature to suffering the blows of repeated assaults. Laurentiis rides with Death (following Emily Dickinson) and learns “Death is the Maker of Origins,” of sense reborn, ergo art, ergo love, singing the erotic in the key of Audre Lorde, “I love this world. I love this world.”

Don’t miss her reading at the Poetry Foundation on April 2.