Table of Contents

Contents

a fierce and violent opening

do you want to dip the rat

ghost flight to the moon

a hospital room

the start of the free and natural

Save your flowers

Floral pattern

Why I Hate The Internet

The miscarriage

The book of stars and the universe

The Clog

There is no name yet

Milking the rest of it

Milk, No 2

Love Poem for Bathsheba

The ghost

The Ghosts

The way we treat them

Become a person

Me and you

If you can’t trust the monitors

Hot Pink Summer Titty Tassels

Twin Peaks

OCD

Kill Marry Fuck

At night the snakes

The Dream

Little Kingdom

The School

Snakes

The Minotaur

Fuck everyone

The Secret Life of Mary Crow

You thought

Winter plums

I feel the heavy

Is it a burden

The Medical Institution

Agatha

Poem for the Moon Man

Blue milk

Promotional Information

• We will promote the book to Dorothea Lasky's dedicated and wide audience (she is based in New York, but her readership is national).
• Promotion to feminist communities and publications.
• Course adoptions campaign.
• Full poetry marketing campaign with review mailings to well-known print and online literary reviews and magazines, as well as efforts toward some high-profile outlets.
• Co-op available.

About the Author

Dorothea Laskyis the author of five full-length collections of poetry: Milk (forthcoming, Wave Books, 2018),Rome(Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014),Thunderbird(Wave Books, 2012),Black Life(Wave Books, 2010), andAWE(Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including:Snakes (Tungsten Press, 2017), Thing (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012), 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), andAlphabets and Portraits(Anchorite Press, 2004). Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared inAmerican Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, MAKE magazine, Phoebe, POETRY, Poets & Writers Magazine, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Paris Review, and6x6, among other places. She is the co-editor ofOpen the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry(McSweeney's, 2013) and is a 2013 Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania,is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst,and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

Reviews

"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