Dorianne Laux

In her seventh collection, Dorianne Laux once again offers poems that move us, include us and appreciate us fully as the flawed humans we are. Life on Earth is a book of praise for our planet and ourselves, delivered with Laux’s trademark vitality, frank observation and earthy wisdom. With odes to the unlikely and elemental—snow, crows, cups, a shovel and rake, the ubiquitous can of WD-40, “the way / it releases the caught cogs / of the world”—Life on Earth urges us all to find magic in the mess of ordinary life. The volume includes powerful reflections on loss and ageing and encounters with the fleeting beauty of the natural world. Transcending life’s inevitable moments of pain and uncertainty, Life on Earth instructs us in our own endless possibilities and the astonishing riches of the world around us.

From "a poet of immense insight and masterful craft" (Kwame Dawes), Finger Exercises for Poets is an engaging and inspiriting invitation to practice poetry alongside one of its masters. With wide-ranging examples from classic and contemporary poets, Dorianne Laux demystifies the magic of language that makes great poetry and offers generative exercises to harness that magic. She explores the syllable and the line, the use of form, poetic responses to contemporary events and personal experiences, the imaginative leap, and the power of a distinct voice. As she writes in the introduction, "My instrument is the immensity of language.... There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.... I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me."Throughout, Laux reminds us that poetry is a practice as much as an art and that poets must hone their language as a musician practicing an instrument.

In her seventh collection, Dorianne Laux once again offers poems that move us, include us, and appreciate us fully as the flawed humans we are. Life on Earth is a book of praise for our planet and ourselves, delivered with Laux’s trademark vitality, frank observation, and earthy wisdom. With odes to the unlikely and elemental—salt, snow, crows, cups, Bisquick, a shovel and rake, the ubiquitous can of WD-40, “the way / it releases the caught cogs / of the world”—Life on Earth urges us all to find extraordinary magic in the mess of ordinary life. “One of our most daring contemporary poets” (Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle), Laux balances wonder at the night sky and the taste of a ripe peach with recognition of the sharp knife of mortality. The volume includes powerful homages to the poet’s mother and her carpenter’s spirit, reflections on loss and aging, and encounters with the fleeting beauty of the natural world. Transcending life’s inevitable moments of pain and uncertainty, Life on Earth instructs us in our own endless possibilities and the astonishing riches of the world around us.

Only as the Day Is Long represents a brilliant, daring body of work from one of our boldest contemporary poets, known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian. Drawn from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive volumes, including her confident debut Awake, National Book Critics Circle Finalist What We Carry and Paterson Prize–winning The Book of Men, the poems in this collection have been "brought to the hard edge of meaning" (B. H. Fairchild) and praised for their "enormous precision and beauty" (Philip Levine). Twenty new odes pay homage to Laux’s mother, an ordinary and extraordinary woman of the Depression era. The wealth of her life experience finds expression in Laux’s earthy and lyrical depictions of working-class America, full of the dirt and mess of real life. From the opening poem "Two Pictures of My Sister" to the last "Letter to My Dead Mother" she writes in her words of "living gristle" with a perceptive frankness that is luminous in its specificity and universal in its appeal. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long shows Laux at the height of her powers.

Entering its ninth year, Best New Poets has established itself as a crucial venue for rising poets and a valuable resource for poetry lovers. The only publication of its kind, this annual anthology is made up exclusively of work by writers who have not yet published a full-length book. The poems included in this eclectic sampling represent the best from the many that have been nominated by the country’s top literary magazines and writing programs, as well as some two thousand additional poems submitted through an open online competition. The work of the fifty writers represented here provides the best perspective available on the continuing vitality of poetry as it is being practiced today.

This debut collection by Cave Canem fellow Geffrey Davis burrows under the surface of gender, addiction, recovery, clumsy love, bitterness, and faith. The tones explored--tender, comic, wry, tragic--interrogate male subjectivity and privilege, as they examine their "embarrassed desires" for familial connection, sexual love, compassion, and repair. Revising the Storm also speaks to the sons and daughters affected by the drug/crack epidemic of the '80s and addresses issues of masculinity and its importance in family. Some nights I hear my father's long romance with drugs echoed in the skeletal choir of crickets. Geffrey Davis holds an MFA and a PhD from Penn State University. A Cave Canem fellow, Davis is the recipient of the 2013 Dogwood First Prize in Poetry, the 2012 Wabash Prize for Poetry, the 2012 Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize, and the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Arkansas.

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection of poetry peels back time to the summer of love and the Vietnam War. Her keen hindsight uncovers the humanity at the center of conflict with language that goes straight to the heart. This work stands as an elegy for the loss of innocence, an homage to the glimmer underneath the urban grunge, and a love song to the imperfections that unite and divide us. Laux possesses what Tony Hoagland calls “the brave art of looking,” with an immediate and compassionate touch.

The narrative poems in Dorianne Laux's fifth collection charge through the summer of love, where Vietnam casts a long shadow, and into the present day, where she compassionately paints the smoky bars, graffiti, and addiction of urban life. Laux is "continually engaging and, at her best, luminous" (San Diego Union-Tribune). from "To Kiss Frank," make out with him a bit, this is what my friend would like to do oh these too many dead summers later, and as much as I want to stroll with her into the poet's hazy fancy all I can see is O'Hara's long gone lips fallen free of the bone, slumbering beneath the grainy soil.

In her powerful fourth collection, Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time.

Dorianne Laux's long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted--poetry that "gets hard in the face of aloofness," in the words of one reviewer. In Smoke, as in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In "The Shipfitter's Wife," a woman recalls her husband's homecoming at the end of his work day: Then I'd open his clothes and take the whole day inside me--the ship's gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull's silver ribs. Spark of lead kissing metal. The clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, and the long drive home. And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures: Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat's eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe ...With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.Dorianne Laux is the author of two previous collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Ltd., and is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Joys of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997), chosen as an alternate selection by several bookclubs. Laux was the judge for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Contest, and is a tenured professor in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. Laux lives in Eugene, Oregon.

The Poet's Companion presents brief essays on the elements of poetry, technique, and suggested subjects for writing, each followed by distinctive writing exercises. The ups and downs of writing life--including self-doubt and writer's block--are here, along with tips about getting published and writing in the electronic age. On your own, this book can be your "teacher," while groups, in or out of the classroom, can profit from sharing weekly assignments.

Finalist, 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Dorianne Laux's poetry is a poetry of risk; it goes to the very edge of extinction to find the hard facts that need to be sung. What We Carry includes poems of survival, poems of healing, poems of affirmation and poems of celebration.