The Shining - by Dorothea Lasky (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky's The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape.

Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King's text or Stanley Kubrick's film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky's poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted--by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.

Review Quotes

Laugh, cry, or shake your head, Lasky cuts to the chase. --Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Brooklyn Rail

If the essence is not in what she says, Lasky's poignancy is the result of subtle insights, both endearing and intuitive, suggested by what language leaves out. --Sophie Sills, Jacket2

She will force you to acknowledge the blackness of the blood pumping underneath your skin or the claustrophobia of loneliness, but she will not allow you to forget there is light, and that it can exist in knowing another person. --Kristen Evans, Rain Taxi

About the Author

Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of Animal, published in 2019 in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry 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 six chapbooks: 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), and Alphabets and Portraits (Anchorite Press, 2004). She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013), co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (with Alex Dimitrov, Flatiron Books, 2019) 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 Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City.