More Monsters

Review of Dorthea Lasky’s Black Life

In her first book, AWE, Dorthea Lasky investigates a world about which one thing is certain: “This is a world in which there are monsters.” According to the poetics set forth in this book, we (as a species) are haunted and spectacular; our existence is constellated by our intimate relationships—and thus by the psychic energy that binds us. Lasky’s monster—her “little one”— is close— he’s “in her bed,” he growls and demands her soul—and when she acquiesces, she becomes the monster. Lasky’s 2010 second collection, Black Life, delves even more deeply into this poetics of possession; her monsters are back with a (less precious) vengeance. In the title poem, Lasky writes,

You are born and it is to a black life
Full of abuse and strange things
Monsters come up to you as soon as you enter
Mouths asunder and fingers thrashing
Dark purple monsters that are so full of blood
They are a darkish red

You grow and it is to a black life
That you consider
All around you is death and atheism
All around you are people who have misinterpreted science
For their own gain
There are nuns, but they are nuns of the air

You die and it is from a black life
That you die from
You leave this one and go into the next
Where nothingness surrounds and evaporates
With the ease of something
That has done this sort of thing before

I leave and I am a black life
I leave you cause you didn’t need me after all
And I want to
Be what you made me to be
But you never really made me
This life made me
The thing that I am (43)

Indeed, Lasky’s speaker in Black Life fights perpetually against a kind of spirituality (or sacredness) which insists on a sense of calmness devoid of fear as she locates herself in the midst of this gloomy, black life removed from God or some kind of creator (in “Jakob,” she tells us that “live things are black”—black in that they’ve been burned, “forgotten where they came from”—but she has not, she continues to speak with the “flat words” which fail to fully convey the flames which have engulfed her in some of these moments; as a kind of supernova, then, she is mobile, enthralled) (7). She refuses to surrender the human capacity for terror in favor of pristine reverence or wonder. For Lasky, awe is bound up in fear; love and loneliness are part of the same restless vector in our constellated experiences and identities, which comprise our universe. Our positions along these constellations might be precarious. But Lasky wants neither stable mass nor ascension into the comfort of an afterlife (in “Tornado,” she writes, “It’s a black life, but I don’t want to die/ I don’t want to die, I don’t ever want to die/ Godamn you, don’t shoot me in my sleep/ Let me rot on this earth forever”) nor numbness (44).

Rather, voice—even a “rattly” one like hers—establishes a potent (perhaps even threatening) kind of presence; muscular undulations of emotions (from the joy of “confessing” an affair to the alienation inherent in all correspondences) along vocal cords mark the exuberant existence of a speaker who simultaneously relishes her reverberations and dreads her reflection in the eyes of others, who is both capricious and deadly serious, whose vulnerability is both a lifeline and a death wish—a source of power and suspension to be sure (17). Lasky explores the exhilarating effect(s) of this power in “Black Night”:

They say that the people love me out there
I can’t imagine
What me soaring in the black night as just a thing
I know that when they might get close to my face
They would stop their love
Ghoul I am when you are close to me
As my niceness does never end
That is the surprise
That the kindness was not an affect, but a choice
And that kindness is entirely very freakish
And weird, the real kind. (17)
…
And later:

I mean black, the darkness
That we all succumb to or if we don’t, never live
I mean love, the dark kind
That is so all-encompassing you can’t ever get away
When I speak to you, you can’t ever get away from me, my love
As much as you might want to, so you give in
Night of ghouls and spirits that I succumb to
So that you may succumb more fully
Black night I am in
Still soaring, by myself
The warm November lights
Glittering below me like a pale escape” (18)

Here Lasky asserts a deep conviction (if belief is figured as a kind of possession, which I might argue is the case) in the inevitability of succumbing to this “black life”; this conviction (or her articulation/presentation of it here) does not preclude loneliness or danger; her boldness relies on an opening up of the self (in an attempt to become vast, then, one risks becoming a ghoul). This embrace of vulnerability allows Lasky to foreground emotion rather than strict logic, which (self) damns her, in some respect, to a kind of eternal wandering or transience, an almost purgatorial state (in “Poem to My Ex-Husband,” she promises that her love won’t diminish: “My heart will yearn for yours through all eternity/ And you will never get away from me/ I will haunt you even when I am dead) (15). In “I Just Feel So Bad,” she writes, “I have no home/ No bread/ I am destitute/ But inside me/ Is a little voice/ That must speak/ It gets louder when you listen” (72).

Lasky’s voice—her talk—is in earnest; it compromises her existence in this liminal realm not through directed communication but rather through the pleasure (or perhaps pain) of self-representation (a kind of bodiless embodiment), a presence derived from/comprised of speech—which displays memories, people, and things (“I am no good/ Goodness is not the point anymore/ Holding on to things/ Now that’s the point,” she writes in “Ars Poetica”) (25).

For Lasky, poetry is the realm of the fearlessly fearful—a weirdness channeled through the simultaneous flatness and materiality of language (or rather, her interest lies in the “materiality of life,” as she says in a September Bookslut interview: “I think the materiality of life is very, very important and I think that these details in our memories, in our stories, are what make our stories alive. So, I feel like these details…are what contain the emotions of love” (1). Unabashed sentimentality or emotionality does not mean that wit or humor is impossible (indeed, her speaker treats Saint Puffy—as in P-Diddy—with sincere awe as she considers his gleaming, white-coated image in “How to Survive in This World”) though Lasky does (mostly) exclude irony from her repertoire (12). In “I Hate Irony,” Lasky tethers her voice to/with fear (and against irony): “If you have ever been truly scared there is no irony in your voice when you scream” (56).

In this poetic landscape where sentimental desires and impulses glisten in imperfection, fear occupies the emotional space/intimacy of belief. In “The Devil and the Infinite Night,” she writes,

Sometimes I get so scared I believe I have been possessed by the devil
So that I scream and holler and try to push him out of me
I wake up in bed and he is standing over me with his yellow eyes
He doesn’t know my name but he knows me

And later:

When I think of death by the devil
I only think of suns
Rising infinitely into space like some nightmare
But a nightmare you can’t get out of because it is the night
That is all encompassing
I get all encompassed by the night every day
People think I am very friendly and innocent
I spend every day inside this house being the creepy thing they couldn’t handle
If they really saw deep into my eyes they couldn’t handle me
Once they would see the darkest part of me surrounding them
The blackest part of my eyes in front of them, a sun that never sets” (39)

Just as the all-encompassing blackness makes the distinction between “good” and “evil” indecipherable, Lasky asserts the tenuousness of her connections to others here. Contained and uncontainable, she is what Elizabeth Grosz would call an object or thing “like no other” as bodies are “the centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, and agency” (xi). Lasky, too tempted not to revel in her desires—the possibilities of love, kindness, devilishness and horror, is bound to be too much. She is thoroughly and constantly creeped out by and scaring herself in her ability to be possessed (though I would argue, too, that this possession is different from the kind advocated by Kate Durbin in “A Teenage Girl Speaks As A Melodramatic, Hysterical Demon," as Lasky declares herself to be less invested in “affect”—and the energy of her impulses/emotions necessarily flatten out against the page). Lasky’s volatility is tempered, perhaps, by her inability to stave off connectivity (a God she considers with ambivalence)—and a brain glowing with the constant presence of imaginative elasticity. In “Memories,” she writes, “You can’t keep God away no matter how hard you try/ He is there to link it all together/ Things go away very fast/ Your brain is not what you take it for/ Let your brain look at everything/ I am so glad it came to save me/ That brain I didn’t even know was there to save me” (26).

The intrinsic knowledge of her own (secret) unwieldiness is a source of agency and brilliance (even as her lyric “I” is condemned to the insufficiency of language and subjectivity)—“I will never/ Be the speaking thing they made me to be/ I am not pronouns/ Nor am I all of them/ I am no I,” she writes in “None of this Matters,” it demands correspondence and reception, a trajectory within this constellation, “Hang me on the moon/ I am funny-shaped so far away/ Stick me where the bunnies go/ Let me lie there with them/ And those awful ears upon me/ Who knows within them/ The secrets I will tell” (73-75).

In refusing to eschew the potential for or potency of love and kindness in the midst of this black life, Lasky risks accusations of being naïve. Indeed, the poet is often criticized as sounding childish. Lasky notes this criticism in her recent interview with Bookslut, stating, “I noticed a lot when AWE came out that people often talked about my poems as if a little girl wrote them. Like there was something cute and young about them…I always thought that the concept of AWE was horrific, not child-like” (1). Although not all of the poems in Lasky’s second collection necessarily feel as imbued with the restless energy of pieces like “Black Night” and “The Devil in the Infinite Night,” the book feels anything but naïve; the (sometimes) implicit horror in AWE burns explicitly through Black Life. Lasky fights hard against the misconception that we must abandon our sense of abandon as we accumulate knowledge over the course of a lifetime, as she writes in “Ars Poetica,” “There is romantic abandon in me always” (25). This seems, to me, like something worth hanging on to.