Black Life

By Dorothea Lasky Description Reviews Emotion recollected not in tranquility, but in radically felt and affirming intensity. In her brazen follow-up to AWE, Dorothea Lasky cries out beyond prophecy and confession, through to an even more powerful empathy. Infused with dark and urgent feeling, Black Life is the fullest existence of poetry, continually on the verge of becoming pure substance and sensation. ...While [Lasky] is thus endlessly confused by reviewers surprised at her “earnest sincerity” with the allegedly self-absorbed “confessional” poets of mid-century, for me Lasky has most in common with a stylistically diverse line of usually forgotten and mostly soulsick writers who’ve inhabited language literally, and risked using the poem as a kind of depersonalizing, radically signifying material ... I think immediately of Penny Arcade, Chris Kraus, and Eileen Myles, Catullus, John Wieners, Ariana Reines, Tao Lin, Tracy Emin... Robert Dewhurst, ON: Contemporary Practice #