The Shining

As labyrinthine as its namesake, Dorothea Lasky’s The Shining is an ekphrastic horror lyric that shapes an entirely unique feminist psychological landscape. Here, Lasky guides us through the familiar rooms of the Overlook Hotel, both realized and imagined, inhabiting characters and spaces that have been somewhat flattened in Stephen King’s text or Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptations. Ultimately, Lasky’s poems point us to the ways in which language is always haunted—by past selves, poetic ancestors, and paradoxical histories.