Pink Theory! (Poems and Intertext)

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.