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 finds Laux at her best. She's witty, engaging, and candid...Echoes of Whitman are everywhere in The Book of Men. Both Whitman and Laux are profoundly democratic poets. Anyone can live in their poems, and their poems can live anywhere. The Rumpus[...]
Provides aspiring poets guidance on writing poetry.
Awake, Dorianne Laux's first book of poetry, is introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine for a reason: It's a near-perfect, emotionally haunting book--one which follows a narrative trajectory that touches upon the speaker's ability to endure the cruelties of parental [...]
Balancing heart-intelligent intimacy and surprising humor, the poems in Ellen Bass's "Mules of Love" illuminate the essential dynamics of our lives: family, community, sexual love, joy, loss, religion and death. The poems also explore the darker aspects of humanity--personal, cultural, historical an[...]