She has been nominated for six Grammy Awards and one Golden Globe Award. She is the recipient of various accolades, including two Brit Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards, and a Satellite Award. Her music is noted for its cinematic quality and exploration of tragic romance, glamour, and melancholia, containing references to contemporary pop culture and 1950s and 1960s Americana. It’s to stay on the ground, to figure things out, to get a little better every day.Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), known professionally as Lana Del Rey, is an American singer and songwriter. At the same time, she knows the real lesson isn’t to master everything all at once. She considers what the rest of the world might think and understands our response. Stepping outside herself, Lana sees the task as ridiculous. She laughs because it’s a funny image: a pop star accustomed to dodging paparazzi, kneeling down and squinting among the rows of cars, studying something invisible. There’s a moment in “SportCruiser” where an instructor tells her that, to really zero in on her intuition, the next time she’s doing some mindless errand-say, picking up groceries-she should take a moment in the parking lot to notice the direction of the wind. Each of these poems feels like an attempt at testing her theory-runways she travels in the hopes of achieving some cosmic lift-off. As she questions why she relates to a songwriter who even her most trusted clairvoyant thinks made no sense, this is as close as she comes to an answer. These poems can zoom so far out that they come in danger of floating beyond self-affirmation into nothingness, a risk she confronts in “Tessa DiPietro.” “Maybe an artist has to function a little bit above themselves if they really want to transmit some heaven,” she offers, reflecting on a Doors performance at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968. After all, NFR!’s “ The greatest” resonates not only for its apocalyptic mood-setting but also for its tangible observations from the sidelines-longing for a specific time and place, worrying about Kanye, tuning in to a livestream. In these moments when she strives toward clear-eyed revelations, I sometimes miss the real-world specificity of her songwriting. As the de-facto follow-up to the best album of her career, what might have felt like a low-stakes side project now seems more consequential. Nearly two years later, the audiobook is out via Simon & Schuster, with a hardcover edition to follow in the fall (along with vinyl and CD releases). In fact, she announced both projects during the same interview in September 2018: “It’s in that vein of deep poetry where anything is allowed and it’s totally free-form,” she said of her book, describing it as an artistic experiment removed from the more laborious world of making records and suggesting that she would probably end up self-publishing it. This poetry collection has been on her mind since the making of last year’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!. She’s talking about taking control of her life, but she’s also speaking to the risks of a project like this one. “I was horrified,” she says, “Feeling as though I’d somehow been found out.” She turns to her instructor and feels only his judgement. Taking to the sky in the aftermath of a bad breakup, she suddenly finds herself paralyzed, unsure where to go next.