Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Featuring selections from five books augmented by 20 new poems, this generous volume from Laux (The Book of Men) reads something like a life story: notably, one that begins with familial fear, incest, and abuse. Travelling through confusion, adult sex, motherhood, love, fatigue, and redemption, Laux ends where she begins: with her mother, who is, to the last, a troublesome nurse. In spite of everything, the poet can't help but celebrate the self's mistakes and triumphs. When Laux welcomes readers into a personal moment, she speaks for humankind: "We've forgotten the luxury of dumbness,/ how once we crouched naked on an outcrop/ of rock, the moon huge and untouched/ above us, speechless." Concrete places abound: bedroom, trailer, hospital psychiatric ward, a porch. There is a lot of sex; for example, "Vacation Sex," an aroused version of a travel tour, revels in its own obsessive pleasure. Some of the best poems here appear toward the chronologically organized collection's end, where humor arrives despite a mother's growing dementia. And in the long biographical poem "Arizona," Laux writes lovingly of that same mother's face as "a map of every place she'd been." This is a catalogue of honest work, from beginning to end.
