The Shining

Readers who would like to fully engross themselves in Lasky’s innovative latest (after Milk) should rewatch The Shining in preparation. “The key to surviving in here/ is to pretend every room is haunted/ even when it isn’t,” she cautions. As the collection’s title suggests, these poems exist in a space somewhere between ekphrasis and feminist fan fiction that inhabits the voices, wallpaper, and atmosphere of the Stephen King horror story adapted for film by Stanley Kubrick. The pieces are entrenched in the movie’s visual vernacular. In one, Lasky revisits a terrifying scene in which the character Wendy Torrance, played by Shelley Duvall, encounters a person in a bear costume crouched between a man’s thighs. The bear and the man both pause and look at her before she runs away in horror. Lasky takes the bear’s perspective: “I am in a fur suit/ looking different completely// No one ever told me/ I had to save you.” In another, she speaks from the perspective of the axe that Wendy’s murderous husband Jack wields, saying, “He told me violence/ Doesn’t exist/ So I hefted him up the stairs/ While he was dreaming.” In these dynamic poems, Lasky pierces into the eye of chaos and terror and finds a strange peace there, discovering new qualities of her own voice in the process. (Oct.)