Mother - by Dorothea Lasky (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Dorothea Lasky's stunning new collection of poems presents an unfurling, terrifying, and fiercely loving embodiment of motherhood as a force of creation.

Inspired by Bernadette Mayer's The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters, Lasky writes from the inner realm of a third pregnancy and guides us through a suspended timeline taut with anticipation. Mother documents caring for small children, the death of the mother, and the simultaneous anxiety and darkness of impending birth, as Lasky transmits from a deep mythic and biologically immediate space: "And even though I've spent / Eight months now / Dreading the sight / Of anything red / Now I long to bleed all over." Invoking the eternal symbol of the mother, Lasky asks us to consider an expansive understanding of the horror and devotion inherent in the daily practices of existence.

Review Quotes

"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

"Exhibiting her typically unabashed, rhythmic, and confessional style, Lasky revels in both shadow and light as she writes through isolation, motherhood, and loss. ...Lasky's voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire."

--Publishers Weekly

She intends to perturb, disturb, disrupt, and awaken."

--Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Boston Review

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author of several poetry books, most recently, Mother (Wave Books, 2026) and The Shining (Wave Books, 2023). Her other poetry books include: Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series and MEMORY (Semiotext(e), 2025), as well as a future book about Sappho. She is the editor of Essays (Essay Press, 2023) and a coeditor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013). Her first novel, Katie, is forthcoming from HarperCollins. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review, among other places. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where she directs the Poetry program. She lives in New York City.