Thunderbird
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About this ebook
• Although Lasky has a particularly strong following among young readers, her work has that rare quality of offering something to every reader. Elements of confessionalism, feminism, the gothic and the grotesque form a potent and unmistakable concoction known for inducing laughter just before twisting the knife.
• We expect Thunderbird to be high on the academic radar. Lasky is popular among MFA students and professors, and has taught in a multitude of venues, from graduate writing programs to elementary schools. Her poems are instructive in the use of a personal voice, contemporary spirituality, the poetic line, and heightened honesty and emotion.
• Lasky publicly identifies with Sylvia Plath, and her work shares an affinity with Plath's. This affinity is especially strong in Thunderbird, her most powerful work to date.
• Thunderbird is as stylistically accessible as her previous work, but new readers and fans alike will be astounded by the continued maturity of Lasky's craft. Here, she expertly blurs identity, and like Plath before her, penetrates the underbelly of the psyche.
Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky is the author of six full-length collections of poetry and prose: ROME and Animal, Milk, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE. Born in St. Louis in 1978, her poems have appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry and the co-author with Alex Dimitrov of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. She is an Associate Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and directs the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program.
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Book preview
Thunderbird - Dorothea Lasky
Baby of air
Baby of air
You rose into the mystical
Side of things
You could no longer live with us
We put you in a little home
Where they shut and locked the door
And at night
You blew out
And went wandering through the sea and sand
People cannot keep air in
I blow air in
I cannot keep it in
I read you a poem once
And you called it beauty
And then I read you another one and
You called it harmony air
My brother is not air, he is water
He is not a baby, he is older than me
And when he brushes the hair from my face
I cannot see him, but he surrounds me
I cannot see you baby of air
I put you in your bed and you get out
I put you in the air and you blend
I put you on the beach and you blow out
Like an air bird, flying and flying
I find other things similar to you
And like you, they are air and
Are nothing eventually
I am not made out of air
I hold your baby body in me
As I am a mother to you
I am a mother to you
My brother is my mother
He tells me when I have lost you
To grieve grieve
He says grieving is good
He says crying is good
He says sadness hits you in waves
Of water and air
I feel your fine hair hit me when I am sleeping
I feel your hair hit me in the head
Will you remember me
When you breeze upon the other world
O you are already there
O you are already there
My brother tells me, you are already there
He is already there, he says
And I cry
And he tells me
It is ok to cry
It is ok to cry,
He says
You are not made of air
It is ok to cry, he says
When you are not made of air
I had a man
Today when I was walking
I had a man tell me as he passed
That I was a white bitch (he was white)
And to not look at him
Or he was going to ‘fuck me in my little butthole’
I wandered away
Who is to say
I think I am a white bitch
My butt is big
But I believe my butthole is little
This violence that we put on women
I don’t think it’s crazy
Someone I know said
‘Oh, that man was crazy’
I don’t think he was crazy
Maybe he could tell I had a look in my eye
That wasn’t crazy anymore
Maybe he could feel the wild cool blood in me
And it frightened him
And he lashed out in fear
Maybe he knew I was the same as him
But had been born with this kind face and eyes
Doughlike appurtenances
What about the day I left
What happened then
Still I’m glad he said that to me
Still I’m glad he was so cruel to me
What bitter eye knew I had a voice
To say what men have done to me
What unkind wind has blown thru my brain
To make me speak for the wretched
To speak wretchedly about the ugly