Life on Earth
Poems
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the National Book Award
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year
“[A] small marvel.… Laux’s deft, muscular verse illuminates the sharp facets of everyday existence.” —The New Yorker
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this spellbinding seventh collection, Laux (Only as the Day Is Long) brings to life the simple pleasures and small agonies of human existence. Many of the poems are odes praising a host of conveniences and delights—salt, WD-40, French toast. The latter entry doubles as a tribute to Laux's Acadian ancestors and offers some of her most delightful imagery as she calls herself the "daughter/ of a people who refused to die: sacks/ of wheat on their shoulders, spoon/ in a belt loop, sugar sprinkled in a pant cuff,/ a sleeping chicken hidden under a coat." The poem about Bisquick, meanwhile, doubles as an ode to Laux's mother, of whom she writes frequently and tenderly throughout: "We'd wake/ to pancakes in the cast iron skillet,/ and it seemed she'd never slept,/ never stopped, eggs cracking open,/ spilling each whole yellow globe/ into a blue bowl." In the quietly moving elegy "Winter Brother," the poet finds comfort in imaging the constellation Orion as an emblem of her late brother, "who died far from home/ on a lonely road." The occasional left-field entry, such as a poem imagining a sexual encounter between Ho Chi Minh and Mae West, keeps the reader on their toes. Laux makes the quotidian feel monumental in a way that is uniquely her own.
