{"id":174910,"date":"2026-09-04T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174910"},"modified":"2026-09-03T16:26:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T20:26:17","slug":"a-poem-is-full-of-meat-dorothea-lasky-on-mother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/09\/04\/a-poem-is-full-of-meat-dorothea-lasky-on-mother\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poem Is Full of Meat: Dorothea Lasky on Mother<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Dorothea Lasky, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>; licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a> (left). Mother<\/em>, Wave Books (right).<\/p><\/div>\n

Across ten collections of poetry and prose, Dorothea Lasky has shown herself to be a writer of formidable range. One of her books is based on <\/span><\/em>The Shining<\/span>; another, about Sappho, is forthcoming. <\/span><\/em>Memory<\/span>, her most recent collection of nonfiction, includes essays about fashion, Satanism, David Hockney, roses, anger, and Bernadette Mayer. <\/span>But this omnivorousness belies a unified sensibility,<\/span> one drawn to the uncanny, outr\u00e9, and polychromatic (emphasis on the latter).\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

While Lasky\u2019s latest collection of poems, <\/span><\/em>Mother<\/span>,<\/span> is just as colorful as those familiar with her work might expect, the dominant palette is darker than anything she\u2019s previously published. The collection\u2019s first poem, which <\/span><\/em>The Paris Review<\/span> published<\/a> in 2023, begins with the line \u201cThe bird was blue and gray.\u201d And the reader soon learns that the world of <\/span><\/em>Mother<\/span> is hewn from blues, grays, browns, and blacks. When brighter tones appear, they are jarring, horrifying, and maybe slightly evil. Red is \u201cmonstrous.\u201d Pink is the color of \u201csmoke \/ Emanating from my abdomen.\u201d Oranges rot in the fruit bowl or on the plate, whereas orange itself portends imminent death.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

As Lasky wrote in an <\/span>essay<\/span><\/a> published on the <\/span><\/em>Daily<\/span> last year, \u201ccolor makes a mood that can wash over anything.\u201d The moods that wash over <\/span><\/em>Mother <\/span>are anger, claustrophobia, and, above all, fear of and for one\u2019s child (\u201cThe holy body writhing,\u201d she writes in the first poem, \u201ccalling out your name\u201d). Poetry\u2019s consolations are fleeting and partial. As <\/span><\/em>Mother<\/span>\u2019s finale surmises: \u201cThe poems are always \/ Taken from their mothers too soon.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

When we met on Columbia University\u2019s campus in Montparnasse this summer, Paris was weathering its warmest June on record. The city\u2019s lawns were scorched, and most of its flowers had wilted. Everyone, us included, remarked on how empty the streets had been and how impossible it was to write, speak, or think clearly. Once we’d sat down, she produced an array of refreshments\u2014bright pink fruit-flavored water, carob-colored cola\u2014for us to share.<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

There are eight different poems in <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i> that are also called \u201cMother.\u201d How come?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

DOROTHEA LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s an irreverence to giving a poem its most obvious title. It just is what it is. There\u2019s a kind of dull tone to it. I have another book coming out soon, called <\/span>The Green Lake<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> and a lot of poems in there are called \u201cThe Green Lake\u201d or \u201cThe Green Lake \u2026 and something else.\u201d It\u2019s almost like a joke I have with myself.<\/span><\/p>\n

I personally\u00a0think any title is preferable to \u201cUntitled.\u201d In fact, I\u2019m sorry to say, when I see a poem titled \u201cUntitled\u201d it throws me into a rage. Of course, anyone can do what they want. I\u2019m sure there are a million reasons why you might think it\u2019s a good idea, but you\u2019ve got to have a title!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

What\u2019s the difference between the \u201cMother\u201d poems and the not-\u201cMother\u201d poems?\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer might be boring, but I eventually found better titles to give those other poems. The ones that are called \u201cMother\u201d are more focused on the mother herself rather than on what is surrounding her, but I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s a deeper meaning there.<\/span><\/p>\n

I originally started writing the book in homage to Bernadette Mayer\u2019s book <\/span>The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters<\/span><\/i>. It was written during her third pregnancy. When I was pregnant for the third time, I thought I would re-create the book, which is prose, by writing letters to my father. But as soon as I started writing them, they became poetry\u2014which always happens! It\u2019s so frustrating. You think, I\u2019m finally going to do something of worth, and then it\u2019s just a book of poems.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wrote the poems in a certain order, and they ended up in the book in a different order. It would be interesting to look back at the original order to see when each poem was written and whether there were more or fewer \u201cMother\u201d poems from month to month.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to hear that they were initially letters to your father. When I read it first, I kind of assumed they were addressed to your mother.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

They <\/span>became <\/span><\/i>addressed to her, because she passed away while the book was still being edited. It was kind of in a different state beforehand. I don\u2019t know how much of it is still addressed to him, but there are threads of him still in it.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Is the use of direct address a residue of those letters?<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I wanted to keep the gesture of it. I love direct address generally and epistolary poems, in particular. There\u2019s an immediacy and a voyeurism to reading a letter. The thrill of temporarily being the person it\u2019s addressed to.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I was rereading some of your earlier collections with mothers on the brain, and details about your mother kept showing up unexpectedly. Like at the beginning of \u201cOutside Chattanooga, Tennessee,\u201d you write, \u201cMy mother used to put the fruit in jars \/ To last us all winter.\u201d What draws you back to her, and toward the mother figure more generally?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been in love with the idea of the mother. The mother as the line of power, excitement, of everything. My own mother was very brilliant and dynamic and had a very distinct personality. She was an artist and an art historian and so, so charming. But not every mother in my poems is her. In the poem from<\/span> Awe<\/span><\/i> that you quoted, I was borrowing<\/span> some sentiments that a man with dementia had expressed to me. I remember a reader once said to me, \u201cOh, I know all about your mother. She used to can peaches.\u201d I started laughing because my mother never canned a peach in her life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

One thing I\u2019ve noticed is how often the speaker\u2019s mother is a kind of moral barometer. The canned peaches evince a contrast with young people who \u201cbuy \/ A can of fruit at the store and do not \/ Grow their own food.\u201d And there\u2019s this part of \u201c<\/span>It\u2019s a Lonely World<\/span><\/a>,\u201d where the speaker is talking about blowing a guy in a car and says, \u201c<\/span>I have done something so wrong that my mother can die from it.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

The terms mother<\/em> and father<\/em> have the same dominant energy as God<\/em> or the Devil<\/em> in a poem. You can\u2019t ignore them. The mother is both a kind of moral barometer and a symbol for the inverse of that same morality. It\u2019s patriarchy or misogyny that creates the image of the mother who has to be pure and completely moral. Complicating the term mother<\/em> is a very important thing for me to play with in poems.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With this book, I was thinking about all the ways a mother can be portrayed. I probably won\u2019t ever be able to shake the instinct to think about the mother. No, I\u2019ll never be done with it. I\u2019ll never get over my relationship with my own mother, because it was the most important relationship of my life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My grandmother Dorothea, my mother\u2019s mother, who I\u2019m named after, died very young. Growing up, the image I had of her was that of a saint. As a child, I used to imagine her superimposed on the ceiling of my bedroom, glowing green, with open arms. I\u2019ll probably never get over that lineage. It will always be an obsession of mine. The mother offers these different ways toward the divine.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

The opening line of the first poem in the book is maybe deceptively simple\u2014\u201cThe bird was blue and gray.\u201d I know blue is an important color for you\u2014in a previous book, <\/span>Memory<\/span><\/i>, you describe memory itself as a \u201cbitter\u201d or \u201cmuted\u201d blue. Are we being let in on a memory here, or is something else going on?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

In everyday life, I tend to like flamboyant things, loud things. I like neon, which I feel is a reaction to the lack of color in the place I grew up in, and because I\u2019m a child of the eighties, which was a neon decade. If given an option, I\u2019ll often go toward extreme saturation of hue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s something otherworldly about that color, that muted blue. The liminal world is so beautiful, so muted, as if it doesn\u2019t have to prove itself. The bird is giving away the fact that they\u2019re neither here nor there. I also do associate blue with my own mother, because she was a very blue person.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

This poem starts off in the first person, then it switches to the second person. At the moment of transition there are these three lines\u2014\u201c<\/span>Inside something turned and wiggled \/ There\u2019s a kind of transformation \/ That can happen on any day.\u201d What kind of transformation is going on here<\/span>?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

I was thinking of birth, death, and metamorphosis all at once. In pregnancy, there\u2019s this moment when the baby is big enough for you to feel it moving. It\u2019s the most warm, wonderful feeling, but it\u2019s also terrifying, like, Well, now this person <\/span>has<\/span><\/i> to come out. You realize that it can\u2019t stay one way or another forever, and pregnancy becomes a tempestuous, ephemeral state of being. Death becomes that as well. There\u2019s a kind of wiggling, a moment when things have gone beyond your control, as when butterflies emerge from their cocoons and you have to mourn the caterpillars.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You have to mourn the caterpillars?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes, I love caterpillars! I love bugs in general. In fact, when I was in high school, my job involved working in a lab with flies. Although that was a whole awful thing I didn\u2019t love doing, so I won\u2019t go into it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, please do.<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I was working in a neurobiology lab, and I had to extract the brains from flies under a microscope. I looked for particular flies, and then I studied how certain fly brains lit up. It was so beautiful, but also very mean to those flies, which I\u2019m sorry about.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Which flies were you choosing, if you can recall?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

They were all a pale translucent green, and if you saw a black dot on their abdomen, you had to take it immediately and dissect it. It\u2019s hard to believe now that they let me do this in high school. I put the flies on a styrofoam platform under the microscope, and there was a tube of carbon dioxide to subdue them. It was horrific, but it taught me a lot. I think there\u2019s something of these experiences in<\/span> Mother<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the things that stuck out to me while reading <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i> was how intent you are on writing about both <\/span>animals and humans in a way that foregrounds the organic. Why is that important to you?<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

A poem is a corporeal thing. When you create in any art form there\u2019s always going to be some element of the organic. And anything organic hits the limits of animality. A poem is full of meat. It can\u2019t ever escape that, and I think that\u2019s\u00a0beautiful, though it\u2019s also terrifying to be trapped in a meat sack. In forms of media that are less language-based, like sculpture or painting, there\u2019s a physical reality to them\u2014the canvas, the wood the canvas is stretched on, the paint itself\u2014but people tend to forget the materiality of language or to think that language is above all that. I don\u2019t think it is. To respect poems is to respect them as living, and more living than us. They\u2019re a relic of the organic, always.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Both in <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i> and in some of your previous work, there\u2019s a kind of ambivalence toward science and medical institutions. There are poems in <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i> that describe what the health-care system is like from a mother\u2019s point of view.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a comforting feeling in the idea of a system that has more knowledge than us, to think that we\u2019re being driven or moved or taken care of by something else. But it can also cause intense paranoia, because it involves a group of people who have power over others. It seems silly to assume that there wouldn\u2019t be at least some poison in the well. That\u2019s definitely the case when we\u2019re talking about the medical system. As soon as you become a patient, you\u2019re this person they can do anything to and have complete control over. When you go to the hospital, you can\u2019t leave unless they discharge you. To be a good patient means not questioning them, which is similar to how a lot of religious institutions operate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t believe that the spiritual world, which religious institutions claim to represent, actually functions like that. It\u2019s more intricately organized and simultaneously more free. Like a lattice of a very deep bureaucracy that\u2019s somehow also fluid. Horace has a poem where the souls return to their \u201chappy seats\u201d when they die, and I\u2019ve always thought of his vision of the afterlife as an immense, infinite stadium. Having a seat, having a home in this grand system, makes you more free to go about things because you know where it is. Whereas here on Earth you\u2019re always having to figure it out.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

In so many of these poems in <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i>, when the speaker seems to be addressing the medical institution, it sounds like they\u2019re being punished. In \u201cRoses,\u201d the speaker says, \u201cI will eat what they tell me to \/ Do what they tell me to.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

During pregnancy, these systems can control you because they feed on something you really care about. You think, I\u2019ll do whatever you say so long as the baby is okay. You can completely destroy me. I feel like that\u2019s how systems prey on people\u2013by preying on the love they\u2019re willing to do anything for.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe this would be a good moment to talk about horror. You\u2019ve written some books that are more explicitly horror-focused\u2014including a whole collection inspired by <\/span>The Shining<\/span><\/i>\u2014but this book also seems to be informed by a deep love for that genre.<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time as writing <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i>, I was working on a horror novel called <\/span>Katie<\/span><\/i>, which will come out next year. I don\u2019t want to say that <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i> is a sketch of Katie the character, exactly, but some of the confessional poems subsequently informed a lot of what she goes through. Many of <\/span>Mother<\/span><\/i>\u2019s themes apply to her, because she is a surrogate mother, and she\u2019s completely manipulated by this horrible system, where there are actually demons and awful people ruining her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Was writing the novel a very different process from writing poetry?<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

Yes! I loved it so much. But it was more painful. It was more of a life. When I was first writing <\/span>Katie<\/span><\/i>, I would get up each day, drink my caffeine, and write. It was intoxicatingly simple and perfect.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With poetry, I\u2019ve never courted a muse or anything. Poetry for me has always been a mutable character, something that might show up, and who knows if it ever will. I\u2019ve never got up, drank tea, and demanded that poetry show up for me. I\u2019ve never expected too much from it at all. Poetry and I have sort of stayed around each other, in spite of me cursing at it constantly. But it\u2019s a tempestuous lover and I\u2019ve never been into that. It\u2019s a beautiful idea, of course, but as a Midwesterner, that\u2019s not what I\u2019m looking for.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prose showed me I could be devoted to it. Even if I was bad at it, it would have me and invite me in. Now I see the act of writing horror as something I can have each day.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

I have one last question about this first \u201cMother\u201d poem. I was reading the version in <\/span>The Paris Review <\/span><\/i>and comparing it to the version in the book and \u2026\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

I changed it!<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

Right! So in the magazine it ends with \u201cYou will save it \/ Just like the others,\u201d whereas in the book it becomes \u201cBut will you save it \/ Just like the others.\u201d In the book, it\u2019s a question.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

The original version I wrote with a question. It was changed for <\/span>The Paris Review<\/span><\/i>, and I thought about keeping it as a permanent change. But to me the poem is more of a question than a statement. When the poem stands on its own, that definitiveness is good, but at the beginning of a book, it gives too much away. And, really, saving people and things is always more of a question. It\u2019s not definitive. You could save someone once, but you can\u2019t save them forever, because they are going to die.<\/span><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/span><\/p>\n

You tend not to punctuate the end of lines. I don\u2019t think you punctuate any in this whole collection, and here it kind of mutes the question. It\u2019s still a question, but not a <\/span>big<\/span><\/i>, emphatic question.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LASKY<\/span><\/p>\n

I made a conscious choice early on in my writing not to punctuate much in my poems. I made this choice when I was working in an elementary school as an M.F.A. student. I was teaching W. S. Merwin\u2019s <\/span>The Vixen<\/span><\/i> and there was a student in second grade who said, amazed, \u201cHe doesn\u2019t use any punctuation!\u201d Of course, that student had just learned about punctuation, so teachers were constantly telling them, \u201cNo, you forgot the period, you forgot the comma, that\u2019s incorrect, you must punctuate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I was drawn to the irreverence of not punctuating. To put a period or a comma or a question mark at the end of a line is so dramatic, because the line break is already definitive enough. You have to really <\/span>want<\/span><\/i> to put it in. I love questions that aren\u2019t dramatic, and I love the idea that everything could be a question. I mean, every line of every poem could be a question, when you really think about it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Luke Dunne is a poet and critic. His work has appeared in <\/em>The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly, and <\/em>The\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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