Pink Theory!
Tactile and synesthetic, Pink Theory! is a migratory exploration of image, poetic form, and philosophy that declares, “We cannot make the world alone.”
Tactile and synesthetic, Pink Theory! is a migratory exploration of image, poetic form, and philosophy that declares, “We cannot make the world alone.”
“We begin with the alphabet. Then we go anywhere,” writes Éireann Lorsung in her vibrant fifth collection. Lighthearted, playful, and sincere about the liberatory possibilities of beauty, solidarity, and joy, Pink Theory! offers a world where poetry is imbued with philosophy, philosophy comes out of everyday life, and everyday life is shared with all living-thinking beings. These poems, woven through with borrowed snippets of music, fragments of poetry, and quotations, illustrate the book’s claim that thought itself—right down to the alphabet—is shared.
Lorsung invites us into philosophy-making, articulating how it arises out of labor, love, community, and the natural world. She seeks to define “these things my bodybrain calls pink”: the moon as it rises “into clouds of nacre,” the tree that “blooms a pale peach like the inside of a leg,” a pink room where “there is no thinking without one another.” Luxuriating in the bounty of collective making, these poems remind us that in a world of poems and philosophy we make by hand, we are all already at home.
Pink Theory! asserts that both thinking and world-making are joyful, warm, companionable, and never-ending—but never-ending like a prism, not a prison. If poem means make, this book says, Let’s make a whole world.
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung is the author of The Century, winner of the 2021 Maine Literary Award, as well as two previous collections of poems: Her book and Music for Landing Planes By, which was named a New and Noteworthy collection by Poets & Writers.
Praise and Prizes
You Might Enjoy
A meticulously detailed catalogue of ordinary people performing acts of extraordinary violence, The Century charts an awakening to structures of dominance and violence.
Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, this collection crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, and the bonds that bring them together. In these poems, the female body rises from a foundation of stars; songbirds are cut…
From the copper plate of an Intaglio print to the patched muslin form of a dressmaker’s mannequin to the maddered boy taking shape on a loom, these poems transform the ephemeral into the eternal. Along the way, the collection combines an affection…
These poems are deeply generous to the reader, serious and playful, alchemizing and liberating.”—Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Goldenrod
The seventh collection by award-winning poet Erika Meitner, Assembled Audience e…
“What a profound gift, this book. What a gift, to feel so among.”—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!
Selected by Patricia Smith for the Jake Adam York Prize, an unflinching, profoundly gorgeous debut collection about beauty, pain, and the resilience of…