Death of the First Idea: Poems

by Rickey Laurentiis

From Whiting Award-winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love.

When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy With Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lived. This staggering, irreverent, gentle and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’ poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the midcentury cinematic icon, The Lady Chablis.   

Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily it is like a tree, then.”  

In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Hardcover

Published September 9, 2025

Reviews

[Gregory Duke]

Read a third of this and listened to the audiobook to get a sense of Laurentiis' intended rhythm to not much avail. Opacity belies a banality here, where turns of phrase periodically sing while the texture of meaning atrophies buoyantly at the surface. So one becomes enmeshed in a work about the trans body (a subject of much literary value, of course) to only find that Laurentiis has not excavated new sites of solipsistic exposure. "1919" exemplifies this dilemma. The poem is very clearly a poem about the marketability of Black trauma over joy, a fairly standard notion to identify in a very white woman-forward publishing industry, but Laurentiis has a note explaining not just her references but also her meaning. Why would she not trust her readers to comprehend the analytical overtone of the poem without her guidance, especially regarding a poem so obvious as to make it itself too straightforward and unlayered in its content? Anyway, Laurentiis' voice reads as oddly airy and unaffected, her poems a series of emotive or intellectual exercises that don't seem to produce much severity of emotion nor thought, but I definitely respect Laurentiis' effort here as an NBA nominee much more than I do Tiana Clark/Richard Siken.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

what does it mean to be in a body? In Death of the First Idea, Rickey Laurentiis moves between shapes, genders, bodies, and ideas with a deft lyric hand and an eye toward classics. From Baldwin to Dickinson to the good old New Orleans, Laurentiis' collection is an endless innovation of the classics. It's a collection to sink your teeth into.

[Joshua Burton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning. One of the best poetry collections of the decade.

[Nicole Perkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

In "Death of the First Idea," Rickey Laurentiis writes in a stream of consciousness style, but the words are carefully curated, inviting readers to consider Laurentiis' thoughts. The poem "Implications for an Arriving Mysticism" is sublime; the final line especially resonated: "I gave you all I/ could to much sensation, and so/ Shut me up, me up in obsession./ Slow obsession burnt me/ To a crisp. I choose/ To live. But is this, see these/Ashes?/ Yours --". The poem "2019" speaks a truth I have never experienced, but am aware of and i recognize the injustices. This collection is an exploration of identity, questioning gender, and inviting acceptance, it is "...the story of a Mad girl wanting to belong." "My sadnesses are intelligent," Laurentiis writes, and "Doubt/ Equipped me with a severe patience; doubt/ Took over my mouth/ And named it convenience." Laurentiis questions their worth, as we all often do: "Haven't I disappointed/ Everyone, Oshun, even the ants, look they desert me/ With the repeal of my so-called genius?"; but recognizes that their self-worth lies in how we see ourselves.
I greatly enjoyed this collection, and I am interested in reading more of Rickey Laurentiis' work.