Thunderbird
by Dorothea Lasky
Wave Books, 2012
107 pages / $16.00 buy from Wave Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Wave Books made a hardcover edition of this book with a pink cover but it is sold out on their website.

2. The only time I’ve seen Dorothea Lasky read was at last year’s AWP (Chicago) where she read in a theater and everyone clapped when she read and thought she was great (I also thought this).

3. After the whole reading was over there was a dance party and Dorothea Lasky was dancing nearby and I told my friend Chris that I liked her poems and I think she heard me and I turned to her and said something like, “Sorry, I’m talking you like you aren’t in the room or something.” She just smiled because she is a nice human being and poet.

4. The title of the book and all the poem titles are typed in what seems like a medieval font–like something one would see on stained glass windows.

5. “I Like Weird Ass Hippies” is probably the funniest poem title in the book (she read it AWP).

6. “I make hell to live in / I make hell”

7. “The world doesn’t care” is a poem that tells the truth and is not complicated; everyone should read it.

8. I am listening to Allo, Darlin’ and writing this and I feel this band is a good soundtrack to Dorothea Lasky’s poems.

9. “Let’s sit in a sea of flames / And I will never put the fire / Out of you” is something I wish a woman will tell me someday when she is talking to me, not reading the poem in which Dorothea Lasky writes it.

10. A person says, “Is this America?” in a poem titled “The Room” and I think lots of poets ask this important question.

11. That same person punches a man in the nose 12 lines later and I think Dorthea Lasky’s poems are good nose punches.

12. “I like weird ass stuff”

13. “I want to be the locked tiger they can’t lock up / Until it murders and then rages through the fields / Of wild grasses” and I say me too, me too.

14. Now I’m listening to the new Bat For Lashes record and I think this is another good soundtrack for Thunderbird.

15. “Worry is the new art” is a good explanation of being a Virgo.

16. It could be an ugly feeling, but I’m too close to it.

17. “Zombies” is a poem in this book that is very kairotic.

18. “Zombies have flat affects / They are so frustrating”

19. “What poets should do” is a poem to rally behind and I want to copy it and give it to all the poets I know.

20. “I am already fucking words”

21. In case you don’t read to the end, I will say that Thunderbird is a great book of poems.

22. “Now I fish for the almighty figure of the wood / The woodcock, or black root”

23. There is a lot of living and dying and what it means to be human in this book.

24. And that seems sad, or not very cheerful–people are cruel and people hear “poems” and say “So what? Whatever.”

25. But Dorothea Lasky’s Thunderbird pulses–it is a book of poems that is life between two covers and makes me happy to be alive to read it and happy that people like Dorothea Lasky exist and happy that she writes poems.

Tags: 25 Points, dorothea lasky, Thunderbird, Wave Books