Rome: Poems

by Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky has been hailed as "undoubtedly one of the nation's most talented younger poets" (Huffington Post). From her first book, AWE, Lasky has been crafting her hallmark voice, a mixture of language that is "boldly colored, unabashed, and wildly human" (Timothy Donnelly), presenting her readers with poetry full of "blood-red realness" (Boston Globe) and haunting lines that "recall Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg" (Chicago Tribune). With each new book, from the grand religiosity of AWE to the flat sadness and nihilism of Black Life to the witchery of Thunderbird, her poems have kept gaining an increasingly robust readership and have influenced an entire generation of new poets, fusing the transcendent vision of the New York School with a kind of performative confessionalism, bringing the force and power of the classical world into the everyday.
ROME, her fourth collection, marks the arrival of this seminal American poet to the classic Liveright imprint. This work finds her in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons, savaged by grief and lust. ROME is a book populated with love's proxies, its wounded animals and desiccated bodies, in league with her chosen poetic company: Catullus and Anne Sexton, Nicki Minaj and Drake. Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith writes, "Dorothea Lasky's ROME is dark, fearlessly frank, unabashedly vulnerable, and full of real live heart." In these poems of high lyricism, Lasky fuses the ancient world, with all its grandiosity and power, with the fierceness and heartbreak of our everyday world, where sometimes all a poet can do is to carry her line like a weapon in an awful blood sport––the blood jet––taking no prisoners as she slashes across a landscape of language, strange fascinations, real people, and the imagination.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2014

Reviews

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

delicieux this is my first dorothea & she's so ! fresh. Rolling in it. I can't think of anybody who's managed to PICK UP the frank o'hara legacy so well & run with that influence. love. will be back for more

[lotb · Rating 1 out of 5]

I cannot understand the accolades Lasky has received by both critics and readers alike: her poems come off as utterly juvenile, simplistic, and rushed. From the poem Lilac:

"[...]You told me I was a bad poet / As if I cared about poetry / At all"

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[ouliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

i love when poetry is poetring

[Alejandro Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Let's speak about beauty. Let's speak about wonder. Let's speak about Rome. Not precisely the city but the great book of poems by Dorothea Lasky. The reader can find in each page of this book multiple roads that lead to the pleasure of reading poetry, that's why people say that "all roads lead to Rome", and they are quite right regarding Lasky's poems. In Rome we have love and despair, life and death but also references to Sylvia Plath, even a wink to Tarot (and I can take here the risk of guessing that Lasky knows the Thoth Tarot created by Aleister Crowley and Frieda Hughes). I loved this book from the first to the last page and I think (but also feel) it is a beautiful and wonderful collection of images, thoughts and emotions that Lasky puts in the "Colosseum" of her poems (luckily this time there is no blood; instead, the astonishment remains).

[Gus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothea Lasky writes in the most tender, savage form, like an animal. She makes me want to smear myself in dirt, eat flowers, and tell people I love them. "The Amethyst" is a really important poem to me, as a severely angsty teenager. I think of a large mouth that processes and deposits me as a pile of parts. It's comforting. "Lilac Field" I also love, for reasons I don't necessarily know. I recommend that you search her readings up on youtube and hear her voice while she reads. I think it really enhanced my reading of the poems. Ugh. So good. I think about it at least once a day and it's been about a week. <3333

[Renee Alberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

I mostly agree with this review of the book: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

While the poet clearly has mastered her unique style, most of the book rang hollow to me. It kind of felt like the poetry equivalent of watching the show Girls.

[silas denver melvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

good moments, but lost me

[MORGAN IGOU · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first poetry book from a big-sister figure, & came out a fan. I never realized the relation we can associate ourselves to in poetry, since books always seem so fictional (& are). Raw, vulnerable, & uplifting, Rome brings up your deepest thoughts & encourages you to sit in the discomfort. Can only be described as fearlessly frank.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lasky has a particular gift for rendering everyday language strange: to be behind with the ordinary and make it alien. Her willingness to deal frankly with darkness, moving conceptions of the self, and troubled relationships to past and places. Her use of Tarot and her references to Italy are largely from her own mind and deal with her own subjectivity as much as with the actual existing places in Italy. Yet, Lasky, whose work is often known for hyperbolic metaphors, doesn't employ them here. Her playfulness is simile and elliptical reference: more idiosyncratic in what she strips away more than how she presents herself. Sometimes this feels airy or even hollow, other times completely arresting, such as "Lilac Field" or "The Amethyst." There is a deliberate carnally here, references to blood and meat abound, such as in the first poem, "Hunters,' where bloodlust is mentioned within the first two words, and in “The Empty Coliseum,” where Lasky's notes "Shells with only the memory of meat //So that they are only the memory of blood// So I will spill my own so as to make a fresh memory." Lasky often uses that carnally against the reader, such as in poem "Porn" notes Lasky recoil from the horror of pornography but not as a prude, and then inverts the tropes, ending with "But are you free / No, you'll never be / I've got you in my grasp / I got you right here in my room / Once again."

Lasky often uses anaphora in this collection, the repetition can be chant-like but sometimes dip in the gimmick and chanting starts to feel coy. One can see in the poem, "There is nothing," where Lasky ends "It meant nothing / It means nothing/ There is nothing / But this / But this" which is a trick that seems too clever and a bit obvious. Lasky also dares her reader to call her out on this repetition: "[...]You told me I was a bad poet / As if I cared about poetry / At all."

So this is not a perfect collection, but it is fresh and interesting, at moments, invigorating and shocking and, at other moments, frustrating.

[Hermella · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dorothea Lasky's poetry is brutal. It is animalistic and raw and visceral. The images of flesh and blood and fur were woven throughout this collection and were the best most impactful part for me.

She uses a lot of the same words--winter, breathren, silver--which is not necessarily a bad thing. But there were times towards the end of the collection where the poetry lost steam for me and became repetitive.

The poetry in the first half were the best. Some of the ones in the second half fell flat and did not make me feel anything. To be honest that is the most critique I have for Rome, that I found some of the poetry boring. I found myself wanting her to get more brutal and gutsy as I was reading this collection and so the more straightforward poems did not do much for me.

My favorites were Why Poetry Can Be Hard For Most People, I Remember In The Morning, and There Are A Million Young Men

[Mary Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ripples in the rye

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothea Lasky's words rise from the surface of the page as if attached to a generator. The boldness, the sway of the lines, the unabashed feeling and living in these poems is stunning. I don't know another writer like Lasky; each poem feels carved in stone as well as in flesh.

[⋆.˚ livia .☘︎ ݁˖ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lasky might become one of my favorite poets of all time.

[siena · Rating 3 out of 5]

when she wrote I would have been ok being Plath but instead I’m Sexton I rubbed my hands together like a cartoon villain

[Zeke Gonzalez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phew! Dorothea Lasky is a total powerhouse, and this book is unabashedly vibrant and raw. The epigraph is Yeats: "Consume my heart away; sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal." And boy, that kind of emotional intensity, bound to a strong undertow of mortality and nature, is a major motif across these poems. These poems tie natural elements (lemons, flowers, animals, & more) into Lasky's personal experiences to dig deeply into carnal human emotions, devoid of niceties and completely vulnerable. Besides the subject material, Lasky's poetry is free verse and frequently repetitive. The way she manipulates syntax and grammar makes these poems require feeling, and not thinking, to understand them. From beginning to end, ROME is savage and unflinching and concludes with the titular poem, a bloody slam dunk that paints the reader with the gore of Lasky's intense feelings. All in all, a simple, deeply fearless, and darkly resounding collection of fabulous poetry.

My personal favorites: I Just Hope I Can Sleep, The Amethyst, Lilac, I Know There Is Another World, The Groveler, The Bed, Wild, and Rome (Part X).

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sat down to read this after a pudding haze. 30 pages in I became thirsty, but I kept drinking the words. They became blood of flowers and I kept reading. They became faceless stars and I kept reading. This is a book to keep reading and reading and reading.

This is my favorite book from Lasky so far. Friends, expect many late-night rants.

[dc · Rating 3 out of 5]

there are moments of utter brilliance here. too bad they didn't cut the poor-me poems that really just read like complaining.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

READ IT.

[Bryony Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

the poems in this book made me feel like a human. as a twenty something girl it felt like something i "got" in terms of how i have to live and what it is like to be alive now.

[Jed Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deliberately awkward with some real gems.

[Alicia B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t vibe with this collection, and I’m still trying to place exactly why- I was more drawn to the first half of the collection and the last poem that was split into different sections. I also think the repetition both serves and does not serve her work at times- I see what a previous reviewer said about how the repetition would be better served by being spoken due to the slight differences in intonation.

Some of the repetitions just read hollow to me. In general, I found some of the poems or parts of them to ring hollow, rather than sharp or exciting.

I also found great moments in her writing- I especially liked lines in “Poem to Florence”- this is one that I would return to, among some other poems in this collection. I’m not sure I would return to this work in its entirety

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had this title in mind for a while after reading so many positive things about Lasky's writing. I'm also a fan of @astropoets on Twitter--I'm not into astrology but it is pretty hilarious. I had high hopes for this collection.

There were some poems that stood out to me as being great, but on the whole I felt it was not a style I liked. "Horace, to the Romans" was my favorite. I liked "Complainers" as well.

What I like in poetry is the strangely beautiful verse that knocks me down with imagery expressed so succinctly that I could not imagine a better way to say it. I can't say I found this in Rome. A lot of people do enjoy this collection, so I know I am in the minority.

[jennn · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I picked up this book, I couldn’t put it down. On the bus, on the trains, during class breaks - I’ve kept reading. The poetry written here connected me so much, I’m awed and shocked. It was a beautiful read full of imagery, emotional, and unique stories. The poet’s writing skills has lead me to practice my own writing skills. It’s been a long time since I’ve read something real that I could relate to. I am glad that I came across this poet: I have a project that I have to do in her. Super exciting! 😁

[Bob Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another favorite I read for the Sealey Challenge 2021. Humorous and spiritual in a provocative rapture without being pretentious. I'm a fan of Lasky, and this did not disappoint.

"Madness is eating animals
I am mad
But I don't kill anything
I sit there bloodless
And my lust, too
It rings"

From the opening poem "Hunters"

[Zee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nihilism, death, and being chronically single. This is a poetry collection that dances on the grave of social norms. It's gloriously messy, and reminds me of Melissa Broder's poetry. The first 2 poems are my favorite in the collection. I'd recommend this to readers who want to read more poetry but aren't sure what poets to pick up.

[Bella Moses · Rating 4 out of 5]

Meaty and delicious. Got better as it went along. The title poem at the back of the book was a particular favourite.

Lots of hair, sex, and corpses here. A different kind of corpse though. Ones that are mere reminders that we are all bodies hurtling towards becoming dead bodies. I have lots of thoughts about this that I can’t quite get into words yet…

To be continued perhaps…

[Nicolas Duran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wild that it’s been a year since I started this. First half took 9 months, last half took an hour. Anyway, I did like this book, especially Art Deco of the West. I just couldn’t seem to pick it up. The ending few poems are a key to the setting of the rest of the book, which kind of float around without that setting, which has a beautiful effect.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't get this until I got this which was somewhere around "Why Is a Mouse Sad?" And then it all started singing (a sort of very low insistent song). I needed to learn how to hear it.
I want this book to be my advice book.
I want it to give me advice about dying and loving.
It does only it does it in the form of lilacs and ghosts.

[Emily Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

so perfect.

[Timothy Pitkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good collection of poems and while I was kind of shocked by the amount of Sexual related words and phrases used but it was a pretty good collection of poems.