Poetry Concentration Head and Associate Professor Dorothea Lasky will publish her latest book, Memory, with Semiotext(e) on November 4, 2025. Memory is a book of poet's essays, investigating the existential question of what defines memory, personhood, and consciousness.
Lasky has written seven books of poetry. Memory is her second book of lyric essays. The collection frames memory in three distinct categories—ancestral, personal, and poetic—to weave and blur individual remembrance with that of the collective.
Memory is an homage to the seminal artwork of the same name by Bernadette Mayer, in which the artist documented her life using a full roll of 35mm film every day for a month and wrote and recorded over six hours of poetry. The project explored the blurry edges of consciousness, attempting to reflect the intangible nature of memory.
"Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning," wrote Semiotext(e).
Lasky's tribute plumbs the depths of her own experience, crossing from the concrete, her father's battle with Alzheimer's and the shared memory of Neutral Milk Hotel's music, into the realm of the forgotten and the meaning made there.
Memory is available for purchase here.
Dorothea Lasky is the author of seven books of poetry and prose: The Shining (Wave Books, 2023), as well as ROME (W.W. Norton/Liveright) and Animal, Milk, Thunderbird, Black Life, and AWE, all out from Wave Books. She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Snakes (Tungsten Press) and Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Boston Review, among other places. She is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's) and is a Bagley Wright Lecturer on Poetry. She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania and has been educated at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Washington University.
