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.
Price: $18.00
Pages: 120
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Imprint: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date:
January 26, 2027
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781639551491
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
POETRY / Women Authors, PHILOSOPHY / Language, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / General
"What does it mean to be living in a world with Éireann Lorsung also in it? It means there is someone to notice the smallest, dailiest things, and to call you back to that noticing. In Pink Theory, Lorsung claims what is hers, what is everyone’s: language, wildflowers, grief, roadside trash, and ‘the real and actual untrademarked moon.’ These are poems asking the urgent questions of our time: How do we live at what too often feels like the end of the world? What can we do with our specificity, our inefficiency, our humanness, when we are too often told those are no longer qualities of value? Maybe you have sometimes suspected, as I do, that caring for one another, protesting injustice, writing a poem, and making dinner might all be revolutionary acts. Welcome, then, to this miraculous space Lorsung has made for all of us, writing, ‘Everyone came into the room: then we were together. Then we could think.’”—Chloe Martinez, author of Ten Thousand Selves
Éireann Lorsung works in a field of images, objects, movement, and texts, and especially in the overlap between printmaking and poetry. Her previous collections include Pattern-book; The Century, winner of the Maine Literary Award in Poetry; Her book; and Music for Landing Planes By, named a new and noteworthy collection by Poets & Writers. She is a 2016 NEA Fellow and held the 2025 Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Writing at Scripps College. Born and raised in Minneapolis, Lorsung currently teaches at the University of South Dakota.
