Memory - Dorothea Lasky

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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—historical, personal, and artistic—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 ancestral trauma, dear departed poets (Lucie Brock-Broido, Diane di Prima, Kevin Killian), 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.

Semiotext (E)
English
Softcover, 320 pages
203mm x 137mm

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