Life on Earth: Poems - Paperback

by Dorianne Laux (Author)

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.

Back Jacket

Praise for Dorianne Laux

"Dorianne Laux [writes] about love and violence, survival and grief, in poems that are clear, compelling and insightful.... [She] shows us how to endure hardships without losing humanity and compassion."
--Elizabeth Lund, Washington Post

"Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise--and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom."
--Jonathan Russell Clark, Vulture

"Throughout the years...Dorianne Laux has not faltered. She has wrestled with the angels and with the serpents; Eros and Thanatos are wrestling still, and the sound they make is the sound of this woman singing."
--Marie Howe, author of New and Selected Poems and Magdalene

"[Dorianne Laux is] one of our best, who never stops paying attention, and is never unwilling, and summons from her readers unwavering trust."
--Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane

"Dorianne Laux is one of those poets I turn to again and again for cradling beauty and darkness so close together in a poem."
--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

"The poetry of Dorianne Laux is essential."
--Nick Flynn, author of Low

"A prodigious imagination that somehow manages to sift through the ordinary, quotidian, and squalid realities of our world, to produce moments of grace and shimmering beauty, and empathetic illumination. Dorianne Laux is a national treasure, a poet of immense insight and masterful craft."
--Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town

"In a vast ocean of too-much-to-read out there, I can always find an island of sanity in Laux's work, and within individual poems, always, always spots of light and breath and truth."
--Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers