Awe

Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books

Dorothea Lasky's debut, Awe, has the force of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", the messiness of a battlefield amputation, the candor of a child who asks, “Were you born like that?”, and the craving of a customer who orders a banquet spread containing only marzipan and raw heart.

Inside my heart, there is a rat who
Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap. . .
And the world from above is blue and brown and slightly sweet smelling.
And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms.
-from "In the T-Station"

And my heart is the warm tap water encased in a block of ice.
And my runny warm heart runs all over him
Who is lying there and my spirit seeps out like a lonely river.
-from "The Lonely River"

My friend's heart is perfume.
I eat her heart with care. . . .
And your heart I place on platters.
(It multiplies!)
And your heart I dine on with my children.
And we laugh at you, your little scowl
Is no mark for the great urgency of this world.
-from "Your Heart"

The techniques Lasky employs appropriately build toward a bloody, all-encompassing embrace. For example, the unabashed pronouncements and careening dramatic narratives are well-supported by the syntax. Lasky tends to line breaks that fall naturally on sentence clauses, and sometimes uses these breaks as punctuation. The result is voice-driven and conversational; truthful and forceful, yet kind.

There are old plans now that should be new.
There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die.
Follow me, I am the crusader of the new
My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births.
-from "On Old Ideas"

Lasky's contradictions serve to strengthen the voice instead of weakening it, and the structure of the book – not sectioned – gives it further urgency. The “heart” excerpts above are all taken from poems near to each other; the themes of the book progress organically but also seem to gain velocity with this progression, as in the poem Philosophies: "There is shit on my hands / When I have been playing around with specifics.”

And through these polarities and strange progressions concerning love, children and birth, art, and intellectual inquiry, there is always a mocking self-referentiality. But it's no use fretting over irony or to what extent the voice is manipulating the reader. The work is simply funny and dead serious – at the same time.

I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.
-from "The Process of Explication"

It's precisely this voice, this unabashed larger-than-life voice, that allows Awe to give the reader a hint of what might be encompassed in the title – everything, especially the “off-colored” and the “misshapen.” As Lasky writes in "Poem for My Best Friend," “In the imperfect way that / All humans are perfect / You are perfect and guess what else is perfect? All of life.”

. . . The blackbirds are
in orbit around its yellow body
like a burned-out picturescreen and when
we love it is us who breaks free, our
blackened bodies the nightsky to the
sleeping bodies in love, twisted and warm
and orbiting themselves around a paler sun.
from "The Mouth of the Universe Is Screaming Now in Agony"

The prophets say we are not one as humans, we are beyond one.
Let me tell you, I am beyond wind.
And the sum of me is as bright as the wind in the morning.
from "The Lonely River"

- Stephanie Anderson