Rome

A heartbreaking collection from one of the most recognized and influential new voices in American poetry.
Dorothea Lasky has been hailed as “undoubtedly one of the nation’s most talented younger poets” (Huffington Post). Rome, her fourth collection, marks the arrival of a major American poet to the Liveright imprint. Known for her “blood-red realness” (Boston Globe) and a haunting voice that “recalls Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg” (Chicago Tribune), Lasky places her work in the arena of eternal longing and heartsick desire, confronting her ghosts and demons, savaged by grief and lust. Rome is a book populated with love’s proxies, its wounded animals and desiccated bodies, in league with her chosen poetic company: Catullus and Anne Sexton, Jay-Z and Drake. In poems “that can be commanding and loud as they can be understated and vulnerable” (Publishers Weekly), Lasky attunes herself to the timeless blood sport that is erotic obsession. Rome’s brutal hallucinations and deadpan humor prove why Lasky is quite simply “one of the strongest voices in contemporary poetry” (Rumpus).