"A starchart of loneliness. . . . In these intensely sad poems, I feel like I'm not so much gazing from Lasky's POV but just adjacent, maybe hovering just outside her space-orbiter-cum-isolette, peering in through the double Corningware panes. Peering in at her peering out."
--Joyelle McSweeney, Lana Turner
"Dorothea Lasky addresses those changes brought on by motherhood--and intrinsically linked to womanhood--in poems that, in turn, provoke and bruise, regret and rage. Milk establishes both its tenor and energy in the first poem."
--Carl Little, Hyperallergic
"Exhibiting her typically unabashed, rhythmic, and confessional style, Lasky revels in both shadow and light as she writes through isolation, motherhood, and loss. At its best, Lasky's voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire. . . . This is an emotionally enriching collection, and Lasky's euphonic displays of vulnerability may leave readers pleasantly dizzy."
--Publishers Weekly
"For all the humor and sneer, Lasky's poems tread the waters of stark fears of mortality, propagation, and innate monstrosity. . . . Yet, somehow, her speaker carries on through all life's suffering--by the cosmic force of Lasky's lyric and whimsy, "Because despite it all / She lived / You know" and so, with Milk, readers may find kaleidoscopic stories for survival too."
--The Arkansas International
"Her blood-red realness howls afresh."--Boston Globe
"She will force you to acknowledge the blackness of the blood pumping underneath your skin or the claustrophobia of loneliness, but she will not allow you to forget there is light, and that it can exist in knowing another person."--Rain Taxi
"Poems that can be as commanding and loud as they can understated and vulnerable."--Publishers Weekly
"Laugh, cry, or shake your head, Lasky cuts to the chase"--Brooklyn Rail
"If the essence is not in what she says, Lasky's poignancy is the result of subtle insights, both endearing and intuitive, suggested by what language leaves out."--Jacket2
"Hers is a consciousness under siege, but not at the expense great compassion and even humor. If her poems sometimes seem like they're yelling, it's as if they're yelling only to you, seeking whatever kinds of justice poetry can ask in the ways only poetry can."
--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR
"In Milk, Dorothea Lasky channels her electric writing into an examination of creativity and motherhood. In parts a critique and in others a celebration, Milk deftly navigates the complex relation between creator and creation, from poetry and new language to motherhood and new life."
--Cassidy Foust, Lit Hub
"In her poetry, Dorothea Lasky does the work of naming for us, saying it as is, but in language and music that gets at the visceral and drags it, wet and sticky, to the surface. She takes power back."
--Kimberly Ann Priest, NewPages
"In Lasky's Milk, anything and everything is only a turn away, whether through metaphor's web of associations or simply the poet's inexhaustible imagination. It's hallucinogenic: in these pages, individual identity falls away and, in exchange, the reader is given access to something like shared consciousness."
--Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal
"Lasky abandons the notions of linearity and coherence, introducing possibilities of renewal out of instances of trauma by reaching for a musical phrasing all her own. . . . Don't look for daintiness nor defeatism in Lasky's weighty lines but rather fierce, quick-witted associations that make space for one woman's power to name her world.
Major Jackson, Academy of American Poets
"Lasky's poems are incredibly visceral, long known for being straightforward and fearless, pushing unflinchingly through some rather dark territory. Her poems are constructed as accumulations, with phrases stacked upon another, moving further and further, heading off into directions unknown that managed somehow to exist simultaneously linked and trailing off into some unknown distance; lost, somehow, and yet connected. Part of the rollercoaster thrill of reading her poems is in seeing just where the poem might end up, often a far distance from where it might open."
--Rob McLennan
"There are many such moments in Milk where the poet asserts her authority to complicate our understanding of metaphor's logic and the symbolic image's reach via rapid direct address, inexplicable numbers, the power of color. For Lasky, a poet whose perpetual present is supplied by her faith in the imagination, a poem is less obfuscated and more dimensionalized. Lasky creates a dimensionality that refuses to be flattened out by readers who insist on undisturbed rational lines of thought. She intends to perturb, disturb, disrupt, and awaken."
--Nathaniel Rosenthalis, Boston Review
