Milk

Reviews / Votes

"In her poetry, Dorothea Lasky does the work of naming for us, saying it as is, but in language and music that gets at the visceral and drags it, wet and sticky, to the surface. She takes power back."
-Kimberly Ann Priest, NewPages "There are many such moments in Milk where the poet asserts her authority to complicate our understanding of metaphor's logic and the symbolic image's reach via rapid direct address, inexplicable numbers, the power of color. For Lasky, a poet whose perpetual present is supplied by her faith in the imagination, a poem is less obfuscated and more dimensionalized. Lasky creates a dimensionality that refuses to be flattened out by readers who insist on undisturbed rational lines of thought. She intends to perturb, disturb, disrupt, and awaken."
-Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Boston Review In Milk, Dorothea Lasky channels her electric writing into an examination of creativity and motherhood. In parts a critique and in others a celebration, Milk deftly navigates the complex relation between creator and creation, from poetry and new language to motherhood and new life.
-Cassidy Foust, Lit Hub Lasky abandons the notions of linearity and coherence, introducing possibilities of renewal out of instances of trauma by reaching for a musical phrasing all her own. . . . Don't look for daintiness nor defeatism in Lasky's weighty lines but rather fierce, quick-witted associations that make space for one woman's power to name her world.
-Major Jackson, Academy of American Poets "In Lasky's Milk, anything and everything is only a turn away, whether through metaphor's web of associations or simply the poet's inexhaustible imagination. It's hallucinogenic: in these pages, individual identity falls away and, in exchange, the reader is given access to something like shared consciousness."
-Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal "Lasky's poems are incredibly visceral, long known for being straightforward and fearless, pushing unflinchingly through some rather dark territory. Her poems are constructed as accumulations, with phrases stacked upon another, moving further and further, heading off into directions unknown that managed somehow to exist simultaneously linked and trailing off into some unknown distance; lost, somehow, and yet connected. Part of the rollercoaster thrill of reading her poems is in seeing just where the poem might end up, often a far distance from where it might open."-Rob McLennan Exhibiting her typically unabashed, rhythmic, and confessional style, Lasky revels in both shadow and light as she writes through isolation, motherhood, and loss. At its best, Lasky's voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire. . . . This is an emotionally enriching collection, and Lasky's euphonic displays of vulnerability may leave readers pleasantly dizzy.
-Publishers Weekly For all the humor and sneer, Lasky's poems tread the waters of stark fears of mortality, propagation, and innate monstrosity. . . . Yet, somehow, her speaker carries on through all life's suffering-by the cosmic force of Lasky's lyric and whimsy, "Because despite it all / She lived / You know" and so, with Milk, readers may find kaleidoscopic stories for survival too.
-The Arkansas International