The Rumpus Looks at Dorothea Lasky's Animal

Mariah Bosch writes about Dorothea Lasky's most recent book, Animal, which contains "prose written primarily for the Bagley Wright Lecture series and published earlier this fall by Wave Books." "While reading each lecture, I found myself tracing my poetic thought alongside Lasky’s. How do we construct our poetry from what we can see?" More from Bosch's review:

...Or what we cannot see? This feeling, like the book itself, is propelled by questions—Lasky asks questions that sometimes don’t have an answer but instead allow her audience to contemplate along with her.

I love this book! I’m not going to inch toward my sentiment to suddenly pull the curtain back at the end. I fell for Animal immediately. I trusted Lasky’s questioning and the way she moved to investigate poetry and its multidimensionality. The lectures guide us through questioning our own poetry and ask our poems what it is they really want. As a poet, I sometimes shy away from my own poems when I’m struggling to understand what they, the poems, are up to—but Animal encourages me to try and go into the “room” with my “wildthings.”

Lasky urges us to let our “I” be “its own cool animal.” As a poet, I want that animal quality in my own work. I seek the ability to let my poems create spaces, whether imagined or lifelike, that are nonetheless wild. I desire to give my readers a reason to enter into the poetic thought that I’m sharing. The animal, to Lasky, is grounded in her idea of the metaphysical “I”—an “I” of a poem that is aware of itself, and aware of you, too...

Read on at The Rumpus.