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Dorothea Lasky’s Memory is a cycle of ‘poet’s essays’ stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why?
Lasky’s inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves ranges across three dimensions of memory: ancestral, personal and poetic. In her singularly clear voice, she enters into their mysteries to return with an expansive collection of essays that traverse the universal and the particular. Memory reflects on the everyday and the emotional, history, trauma and charged sites of collective reminiscence, such as the moon landing. Other pieces address the other side of memory: her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s, asking what’s left where memory is absent, and what’s ‘real’ beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with ‘Time, the Rose, and the Moon’, an ars poetica exploring the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory and art. In tribute to Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning.
