Rickey Laurentiis
“I think my duty is pitched toward the past (the dead) and toward the future (the not-yet-born). Paradoxically, this means I must be explicitly, deeply, critically moored to the present.”
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“Death of the First Idea is a potent lyric collection of resounding transformation and ingenuity. Here is a poet in an ecstatic trance, dancing with the muses. Each page is an inferno of linguistic fervor, reforging trans identity and femme imagination. Deeply felt, rigorous, and erudite, these poems strike deep in the mind and stick to the soul. Startling and raw and exquisitely fearless, above all, these poems choose to live.”
“Whether in praise songs, appraisals or meditations, the poems of Boy with Thorn embody an ardent grace. Their accomplished structures house a fearless sensitivity. Laurentiis fills history with his ‘crucial blood,’ his ‘stubbornness,’ his ‘American tongue’; and history, in return, fills him with crucial muses (from Auden to Hayden), stubborn ghosts (such as Emmett Till), and manifold expressions of culture (southern, sexual, spiritual). The result is an extraordinary, and ultimately, irreducible debut.”
“Rickey Laurentiis’s debut collection is a stunning achievement. Fearless in its intimacy, Boy With Thorn looks at America’s history of violence against the black body, at desire and sexuality, and at the racial tensions in art all through a painfully personal lens.”
Rickey Laurentiis is a poet who was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, to study light. Her next book of poems is Death of the First Idea, to be published by Knopf in September 2025. She is the author of Boy with Thorn (Pitt Poetry Series, 2015), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery award, and the PEN/Osterweil Award. It was named one of the top ten debuts of 2015 by Poets & Writers Magazine and a top 16 best poetry books by Buzzfeed, among other distinctions. Individual poems have appeared widely, including Boston Review, Feminist Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, New Republic, The New York Times, and Poetry; have been anthologized in Extraordinary Rendition: (American) Writers Speak of Palestine, Bettering American Poetry, and Prospect.3's art catalogue Notes for Now. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Ukrainian.
Laurentiis is the inaugural fellow in Creative Writing at the Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics, as well as a Lannan Fellow.
In a conversation with poet Solmaz Sharif, when asked what she perceived as her “duty” as a poet, Laurentiis said, “I think my duty is pitched toward the past (the dead) and toward the future (the not-yet-born). Paradoxically, this means I must be explicitly, deeply, critically moored to the present. I think of a description of the poem you often mention, but I forget the attribution: about poems functioning as either “diagnostic” or “curative.” I find I lean toward the former, which means to face and acknowledge all of the past, brutal or otherwise. And I lean this way towards hoping, in a future, that my poems, however contaminated they may very well be, may approach the latter. “
Laurentiis was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, She received her MFA in Writing from Washington University in St Louis, where she was a Chancellor's Graduate Fellow, and her Bachelors in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, where she read literature and queer theory. She lives in New Orleans. Friends call her Riis.
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