Lakey Teasdale is a publishing name used by poet Lakey Comess, an American-born writer whose work has appeared in Shampoo, Otoliths, Milk, Big Bridge, Versal, Gulf Stream, Hutt, and other literary magazines. Born in the United States in 1948, Comess has lived in Israel, South Africa, the Orkney Islands, and Glasgow.
Her poetry often draws energy from found language, recurrence, abrupt shifts of register, public speech, and the sonic pressure created when familiar phrases are displaced into a literary setting. That practice places Teasdale among contemporary poets whose work treats language itself as a changing field of rhythm, association, and interruption.
Lakey Teasdale and Lakey Comess
The names Lakey Teasdale and Lakey Comess appear across different publications by the same writer. Later biographical notes in Otoliths identify Comess as having published under the Teasdale name as well, providing a useful bridge between the earlier magazine record and her later work.
The Shipping Forecast poems
Teasdale’s work in Shampoo includes poems built around the language of the British Shipping Forecast. The forecast offers a distinctive verbal system: place names, wind directions, pressure, visibility, repeated measurements, and ritual phrasing. In poetry, that vocabulary can become sound material as well as information.
Her treatment of broadcast language connects naturally with Shampoo’s guide to sound devices in poetry. Repetition, phonetic echo, altered phrases, and shifts between technical diction and cultural reference make the ear central to the reading experience.
Magazines and experimental writing
Comess’s publication history links her to the international small-magazine culture that has long supported experimental poetry. Milk Magazine lists Lakey Teasdale among contributors alongside poets including Charles Bernstein, Bill Berkson, Amy King, Simon Pettet, and Rodrigo Toscano. Otoliths later published work under the name Lakey Comess.
These contexts place her writing within a broad field of modern poetry where collage, found language, typography, sound, and procedural structures expand the possibilities of the lyric page.
International life and place
Comess’s biography spans the United States, Israel, South Africa, the Orkney Islands, and Glasgow. That geographic range forms a useful context for poetry attentive to place names, transit, weather systems, broadcast geography, and the unstable relation between local experience and wider maps.
Readers exploring the magazine’s larger network can continue through Shampoo’s poets archive.