Animal
Dorothea Lasky
Reviewed by Samuel Binns
Diving into the trickster-like nature and imaginative qualities of self, ghosts, color, and bees, Dorothea Lasky’s essays within Animal invite “the I to be its own cool animal.” Like a gust of wind, Lasky’s first essay about ghosts prompts poets “to resist the traditional ways logic seeks to jail itself,” which forms the central call to action of the collection. Animal serves as a handbook to fortify the infrastructure of the city of Imagination.
Lasky crafts a dazzling testimony of color and its transformative role in how we perceive the world. She puts a light to prisms through discussions of synesthesia and Rimbaud’s disorganization of the senses, illustrating color as a “live wire that illuminates its frequency.” Referencing Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day, she shares “poetry can learn from others on the autism spectrum and those who sense the world differently because color is sensual.” Lasky champions for the inclusion of colors beyond ROYGBIV to convey an image's unique and iridescent brilliance.
And her navigation of creativity is a model to follow: to celebrate the inner spirit and personalities of each word. She advocates for naked truth and intuition: “our greatest gift as a humanity is the dance of the spirit through the imagination as manifest in language.” Speaking of a poem’s own manifestation, Animal features an elegy for bees: “what the bee makes, a set of containers of well-used space, is the nonsentimental machine of a poem.”
Throughout each essay, she draws curtains and attempts to undefine the spatiality of poems, weaving threads of liminality in order to navigate the spaces between the human and the animal, the real and dream worlds, the living and the dead. Lasky unboxes the pigeonholes and Animal resides in a realm of poetic possibility.