What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Dorothea Lasky's MEMORY is a cycle of poet's essays ranging across three dimensions of memory - ancestral, personal and poetic - to reflect on art; time, both everyday and the transcendent; charged sites of collective reminiscence, such as the moon landing; and forgetting through her father's experience of Alzheimer's.

Lasky broaches the edges of knowability: what's left where memory is absent? What's 'real' beyond the horizon of death? The book closes with 'Time, the Rose, and the Moon', an ars poetica exploring the ouroboros as a symbol for the nonlinear processes of time, memory and art. Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the possibility of fixed meaning.

A luminous and searching meditation on memory, identity and art from one of America's most original poetic voices.

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Shining (2023). She is also the author of the prose book Animal (2019) and a forthcoming book about Sappho, as well as the editor of Essays (2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (2013). Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic and Boston Review, among other places.

Book Information
ISBN 9781068240911
Author Dorothea Lasky
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Silver Press
Publisher Silver Press
Weight(grams) 190g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 12mm