Books by Dorianne Laux

Facts About the Moon: Poems

by Dorianne Laux

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."―Philip Levine 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.

The Book of Men: Poems

by Dorianne Laux

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."―Philip Levine 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.

The Book of Men: Poems

by Dorianne Laux

“Dorianne Laux dares to parse her life through the prism of men who’ve passed through it.” ―New York Times
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 Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

by Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux

From the nuts and bolts of craft to the sources of inspiration, this book is for anyone who wants to write poetry-and do it well.
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.

Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

by Dorianne Laux

A collection of new and selected works from a prize-winning poet known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian.
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.

Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

by Dorianne Laux

Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“Clear, compelling and insightful.” ―Washington Post
Earthy and lyrical, Only as the Day Is Long draws from Dorianne Laux’s five expansive, award-winning volumes and includes twenty new odes that pay homage to the poet’s mother. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, of sexual love and celebration, Only as the Day Is Long represents a bold and brilliant body of work from a “poet of immense insight and masterful craft” (Kwame Dawes).

Life on Earth: Poems

by Dorianne Laux

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity.
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.

Finger Exercises for Poets

by Dorianne Laux

An illuminating book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets, from Pulitzer Prize finalist and The Poet’s Companion coauthor Dorianne Laux.
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.

Awake

by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma

Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No―to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies.
In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.

Awake

by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma

A mother seeks freedom for her young son—and rediscovers her own need for it in the process—in this powerful novel about family, identity, and love

Once a painter, a traveler, a lover of light, Anna Simon has been living in the dark ever since she gave birth to Max, a child with a rare genetic disease for whom even an hour in sunlight could prove fatal. For years, Anna has home schooled Max and structured her life around his, despite the fact that her husband, Ian, favors mainstreaming. When Anna learns of a camp in upstate New York for children with the disease, she sees room for a compromise—a sanctuary for Max, a place where he can interact with other children and be both safe and free.

And so the summer that Max is nine, the family heads off to Camp Luna. At first, it seems like the answer to their problems. But as Anna is drawn into life there and gets to know Hal, the camp’s charismatic founder, freedom and safety prove to be complicated things. What begins as a novel about a mother with a sick child quickly becomes an intricate examination of one woman’s identity as Anna—given sudden breathing room—looks around at her life and finds that she has lost track of essential pieces of herself. What, exactly, are safety and freedom? And at what cost—to one’s self and the people in one’s life—should they be protected and pursued?

Beautifully written, emotionally wrenching, Awake showcases the strengths of Elizabeth Graver’s acclaimed previous novel, The Honey Thief, the focus shifting from childhood to adulthood, to limn the passions and intricacies of a woman’s mind and heart.

Awake

by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma

In a big, big city
on a busy street
at the tipity-top of a tall building
lives a girl.

One night, after a story,
a snuggle,
and one last sip of water,
she was getting sleepy...when out of the corner of her eye...

\\ () //
//(__)\\

SPIDER

The girl was no longer sleepy. Now, she was...AWAKE.

In a brilliant debut, Mags DeRoma gives us an empowered young child who is trying to solve the biggest problem she's ever faced: how to get the spider out of her room without actually having to go near it.

With bold cut-paper art, AWAKE is sure to stay with readers for a long time.

Awake

by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma

She's on the run from a past she can't remember in this twisty psychological thriller from Natasha Preston, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE CELLAR!
Scarlett Garner doesn't remember anything before the age of four―until a car accident changes everything. She starts to remember pieces of a past that frighten her. A past her parents hid from her…and a secret that could get her killed.
Teen thrillers also by Natasha Preston:
The Cellar
The Cabin
You Will Be Mine
The Lost
The Twin

Awake

by Dorianne Laux, Natasha Preston, Elizabeth Graver, Harald Voetmann, Mags DeRoma

First published in 1990 and now back in print, this much sought-after collection marked the stunning debut of poet Dorianne Laux. Awake chronicles Laux's coming to terms with a childhood darkened by violence and sexual abuse--a struggle at once to embrace and to forgive the past.

What We Carry (American Poets Continuum)

by Dorianne Laux

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.

Best New Poets 2014: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers

by Dorianne Laux

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.

Life on Earth Poems

by 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-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.