Coming from Milkweed Editions on January 26, 2027. You can preorder a copy here. (Please do! Preorders make a huge difference to books’ reception and longevity.) Interested in a visit—to your book club, your library, your university, your kitchen table? Please put some details here and I’ll be in touch.
From the publisher:
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.
The Kenyon Review has published a few poems from this book. Here is “Reading Theory”. (You’ll have to make an account to read, but you can read up to five pieces per month for free once you do.)
Women’s Studies Quarterly published a poem called “Cloth Manifesto” back in 2013. It’s available here through Project Muse, which does require sign-in.
Diagram 12.5 includes “Pink”, one of the earliest publications from this manuscript. (No sign-in required.)
Wondering what “pink theory”(!) means? 1. Read the book; 2. I will come to your [kitchen table, back yard, classroom, public library, café, etc.] to talk with you about that; I will do this for free if you are Just a Person/Just Some Neighbors or if you are a public library (details here); 3. See below.
