Book Review

What this book cares about most:

• Death of the First Idea is a masterwork in intertextuality—weaving together the personal, spiritual, academic, historical, and cultural into a collection that expands the speaker’s experience as a Black trans woman.
• Language springs forth from this collection, even as many poems address the trauma and loss of transphobic and racist violence. We see Laurentiis “snatch back [her] mind” in this powerful and incisive hybrid work.

Poems that moved me:

• “Toward a Tall Lyric for Palestine (or, Scratching the Harder Thinking)”
• “Use of the Erotic”
• “The Vague Year (or, at the End of the World My Long Psychosis Began)”
• “The Making of the Complete Lover”

Lines that lingered:

• “Who wants a pacifying lyrical gospel delivered knows by now I cannot please them, that I am Culpable, that I have not stopped this ego rolling down my cheeks to give my witness.”
• “I swore that sharp, white skirt / Bites at the Eyes; that in bright, excessive sun it gleamed.”
• “Nigh the end of my twinkdom I dommed / for no one, per usual. Was the advent of / that Open questioning, God-awful / Flashback”

Figurative language and formal feats:

• Laurentiis manipulates time and space with the range of her poetry. Short fragments titled “Tiresiad” act as a creation myth interspersed throughout the collection.
• Meanwhile, the dense multi-page prose poetry of “Toward a Tall Lyric for Palestine (or, Scratching the Harder Thinking)” and “The Vague Year (or, at the End of the World My Long Psychosis Began)” don’t let the speaker or reader come up for breath as Laurentiis interrogates power, violence, and selfhood.

This book is in conversation with:

• Laurentiis continues the conversation herself in the Notes—Death of the First Idea is so deeply intertextual, this is the first time I’ve read the entirety of the Notes before even finishing a collection. She brings together ancient philosophers, contemporary scholars, hymns, myths, Black and trans pioneers, and historical documents that are worth delving into after finishing the book itself. In fact, Laurentiis is actively in conversation with her debut collection, Boy with Thorn.

Questions this book made me ask:

• What does it mean to be American on a global scale?
• What kind of foundation do Creation myths create for our beliefs?
• How does a poet’s old work/self converse with their new work/self?

Who I would give this book to:

• Writers interested in history, philosophy, and anything Wave Books publishes.
• Readers who want to be challenged and actively engaged by the text.
• Anyone who read Laurentiis’s debut Boy with Thorn.