A luminous and searching meditation on memory, identity and art from one of America’s most original poetic voices.

What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Dorothea Lasky’s MEMORY is a cycle of poet’s essays ranging across three dimensions of memory – ancestral, personal and poetic – to reflect on art; time, both everyday and the transcendent; charged sites of collective reminiscence, such as the moon landing; and forgetting through her father’s experience of Alzheimer’s.

Lasky broaches the edges of knowability: what’s left where memory is absent? What’s ‘real’ beyond the horizon of death? The book closes with ‘Time, the Rose, and the Moon’, an ars poetica exploring the ouroboros as a symbol for the nonlinear processes of time, memory and art. Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the possibility of fixed meaning.