Constellating four central topics—ghosts, colors, animals, and bees—in highly attuned prose, Dorothea Lasky explores the powers and complexities of the lyric, “metaphysical I ,” which she exposes as one of the central expressions of human wildness. In deceptively simple language carrying profound insights directly to readers—with a sense that is at once bold and subtle—Lasky serves as an encouraging guide through the startling, sometimes dangerous, always exhilarating landscapes of feral poetic imagination. "Hers is a consciousness under siege, but not at the expense of 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 "Lasky’s voice is hypnotically primal, resulting in inexplicable, yet palpable desire." —Publishers Weekly "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 "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 "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 "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 Dorothea Lasky is the author, most recently, of The Wild Wind in the Space of the Word , published in the Bagley Wright Lecture Series from Wave Books (Wave Books, forthcoming). She is also the author of several full-length collections of poetry, including Milk (Wave Books, 2018), Rome (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), and AWE (Wave Books, 2007), and is the co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry (McSweeney's, 2013). She holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania, is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and has been educated at Harvard University and Washington University. She has taught poetry at New York University, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts and lives in New York City. Introduction Every Name in History is I. –Nietzsche Poems are gifts that we give to the wind. The best gift that a poet can give is to allow their I to be its own cool animal. An I that is a wild thing, a mercurial trickster that resists all definition, that is so close to a self (or the self)—and so far away from it at the same time––that the reader can’t help but see a real self in it. An I that is a self who makes so many contradictions, who manipulates the reader and their expectations to such a degree that the reader is left feeling both full and empty after having encountered it. In this brief compendium of four lectures, I will talk about poetry and its relationship to ghosts, colors, animals, and bees. In each of these discussions, I will be thinking of poetry a least a little through the lens of an idea I have termed, the metaphysical I. Although the idea is never named within these lectures, it affects them, as it is the crux of my poetics. It functions as a ghost haunting this book. The metaphysical I is not a new idea really, just maybe a new term. I define this I as a wild lyric I , one that has no center and has no way to predict where it will go. An I in a poem that is a shapeshifter. A persona that uses unexpected language and imagery, that is inconsistent, frightening, funny, and beyond the I dea of a singular self. I started thinking about this kind of I because I think that oftentimes a contemporary reader of a poem will conflate the I of the poem with the I of the poet (despite the fact that we have been taught in school not to do so). This always frustrates me. Because when we reason out genre distinctions clearly, the I of a poem is always a kind of performer. The I of a poem necessarily wears a mask and is an actor. Upon its birth it has been given the holy task of acting both like and not like its real self. Always the I of a poem is the main eulogist at the memorial of what it wanted immortality to be while it was still a living thing. As readers, we know that the greatest distance possible bet