About the Book
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From Whiting Award–winner Rickey Laurentiis, a mythic, lyric, decade-in-the-making new collection of masterful poems that probe the meanings of trans/formation and re-creation, a new classic about gender and love
When Rickey Laurentiis debuted in 2015 with Boy with Thorn, the poetry world heralded the arrival of an astonishing new lyric talent. “Call Rickey Laurentiis’ stylistic range virtuosity or call it correctly, necessity,” Terrance Hayes wrote. In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives. This staggering, irreverent, gentle, and erotic book is a record of that ten-year journey. It draws on, expands, and then fractures the many poetic traditions which informed Laurentiis’s poetics—from Greek odes and early Black Spirituals to the work of Whitman and Dickinson and the mid-century cinematic icon The Lady Chablis.
Then, brick by brick, she builds them anew and makes them her own. She maps a path onto the contradictions, precarity, and revelry of her hometown, “New Orleans / As that modern text, witnessed, and revised, by the light as radically / As by the water, which is history, which slip / Thru your hands. This city is a ghost for hire.” With this as her frame, Laurentiis meditates on what it means to be trans and Black in this nation and in her own body, when both demarcations are often excuses for violence. She goes further, examining pleasure and deep-felt pain, in a rhythmic, wild embrace of life, an act of spirit work and self-grace. “You see something in me,” she writes, “something grand, / Your very cowardice yearns for; you / Who would want to own it, wear it, be by it adorned, / It is so rare a thing, so fine as I am, and seemingly / Fragile, creole, and easily decadent: it is like a tree, then.”
In a world where what one is, and how one looks, or even just the idea of a person can get one killed, this is transformative work. This collection does not stump for its humanity, nor does it compromise its art in order to speak in its own voice. Sprung to its own sound, celebratory without apology, this is a book which reclaims the act of poetry itself, too, for the way it can reshape the writer, the mind, the body, the story we choose, and the images the world can imprint on us. (Can poetry do that?) Approaching from every angle and expanding in every direction as we read, Death of the First Idea probes every aspect of transformation. Celebratory, interrogatory, reclamatory, full of rage and range, these are poems for the storms of our time.
About the Author :
RICKEY LAURENTIIS is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.
Review :
“For those who’ve followed Laurentiis’s work since Boy with Thorn, there is no doubt that she is the real deal from first utterance. With erudite, vexed, and scintillating syntax, at once archaic and unimaginably futuristic, this long-awaited follow up is an ecstatic and undeniable celebration of language and being. I’m truly in awe. But mostly, I’m grateful to be alive alongside this once-in-a-generation talent, who has given English new angles to live and fight by.” —Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother
“Death of the First Idea is a potent lyric collection of resounding transformation and ingenuity. Here is a poet in an ecstatic trance, dancing with the muses. Each page is an inferno of linguistic fervor, reforging trans identity and femme imagination. Deeply felt, rigorous, and erudite, these poems strike deep in the mind and stick to the soul. Startling and raw and exquisitely fearless, above all, these poems choose to live.” —Safiya Sinclair, author of How to Say Babylon
“[Rickey Laurentiis’s] poems are heady and sensual: their virtuosic work draws upon myth and canonical poetics to make something pioneering. From sinuous lyricism to urgent declamation, their work traces the complex relationships among power, freedom, and violence. You find yourself moving your lips as you read these poems; their sounds make beautiful and awful shapes.” —Whiting Award Selection Committee
“Laurentiis’s visionary sophomore outing (after Boy with Thorn) showcases her incredible lyric range and incisive commentary. . . . This generous and perceptive collection thrills.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[A] wild, beautiful, raging, ranging collection, a decade in the making and worth the wait … a book of extreme range, erudition, allusiveness, and playfulness … Laurentiis the political poet moves effortlessly, liberatingly, from the personal to the global and back again, with never a suggestion that one sphere of action is everything, the other nothing.” —Ryan McIlvain, Los Angeles Review of Books
