From close-up to wide angle

“It’s a lonely world/ Hi everybody/ It’s Dorothea, Dorothea Lasky”

In voyeuristic times like these, it might just seem like the natural next step that a poet’s relationship to her poems would grow to resemble that between a reality star and the cameras hidden in her house. The “I’’s have it: Lasky is effervescently present in every word of her marvelous second volume, “Black Life” — the follow-up to 2007’s awesome “Awe.” She’s so close, in fact, that you may have to switch your lens.

It takes a poet of toughness and dexterity to work profitably with the first person, but Lasky rises to the occasion with what often feels like an epic intimacy. As with the poems that comprised “Awe,” Lasky can often cause you to feel more like some sort of psychic eavesdropper than a reader, as in the opening lines of “Poem to My Ex-Husband”:

“Dear husband, I tried to write you an e-mail/ But I didn’t have the right address/ My husband, I love you so much/ Will you be mine forever/ I know you are married now/ Does that matter’’

But where “Awe” balanced Lasky’s fascinations with the spiritual self with a caution to “be scared of yourself,” the poems of “Black Life” stay fixed in a darker stare, charting death, desire, jealousy, loss, love, and loneliness with equal parts emotional warmth and factual chill. All the while, Lasky’s mix of stark truth and playful affect effectively foregrounds the former: “Sad” opens “I am just so very sad/ And this is not for some gesture/ That I tell you about this sadness now.” It may very well be for some gesture that she tells us of her sadness, and elsewhere, “I Hate Irony” is hard to accept as an absolute maxim behind her work; but Lasky leaves her contradictions intact, and the ease with which she frees them permits us to accept the often vexing both-ness of our lives.