Memory by Dorothea Lasky

Memory by Dorothea Lasky

A poet's spacious exploration of time, memory, and art, in homage to Bernadette Mayer.

A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? 

Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory--ancestral, personal, and poetic--and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art.

Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."

Alex Dimitrov and Dorothea Lasky are the duo behind the beloved Twitter account @poetastrologers, better known as the Astro Poets. Dimitrov is the author of three poetry collections, and his work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Lasky is the author of six books of poetry and prose. Her work has been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and she is an Associate Professor of Poetry at the Columbia University's School of the Arts.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635902594
Title	Memory
Author	Dorothea Lasky
Series	Semiotext Native Agents Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Semiotext (E)
Year published	2025-11-04
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.