This book is smart, fierce, lyrical, and gorgeous. Layered figurative imagery, music, a narrative impulse that engages human and animal worlds, family, faith (or lack of it) and is powerful in its restrained and strategic balance between image and utterance. Some of these poems just cut me. I have pages of notes about it, but really, I just want to say, you should read it. In "Hummingbird," Laux writes, "We buried the hummingbird/ in his mantle of light, buried/ him deep in the loam, one eye/sta...

Writer's Almanac has been posting some killer poems from this, and it takes a lot for me to be that captivated by a poem.

Moon in the WindowI wish I could say I was the kind of childwho watched the moon from her window,would turn toward it and wonder.I never wondered. I read. Dark signsthat crawled toward the edge of the page.It took me years to grow a heartfrom paper and glue. All I hadwas a flashlight, bright as the moon,a white hole blazing beneath the sheets. I don't know how to review this? There is just so much good here. She dives into her own life and comes up with these beautiful words spilling out, and

Dorianne Laux brought me into Goodreads... This is her most recent book and each one grows only stronger and more expansive. Building from her beginning work which carried primarily the narratives of the personal, Laux now carries the narrative of moon, trees, the culture... without losing the erotic charge of language and life that have been hers from the start.

When my book group discussed this, we'd read a poem and then say, "And that was yet another tour de force." Seriously, this is a perfect book about imperfect stuff. Every poem hits the mark, and there is enough internal rhyme to make your brain buzz. What a poet!

I like Laux's sensuality, the way she can capture a single image or tell a whole story in the same amount of space. She's got her moments of sly humor and clever line breaks, and she can bring the quiet angst, too. Her writing flows smoothly, no hundred dollar words or convoluted narratives, just a clear, easy voice.Some of my favorites: Cello, Vacation Sex, Laundry and Cigarettes, Puzzle Dust, What's Terrible.January 2020: I feel like I appreciated different things about Laux's poetry this time...

This is a great collection. I can't get over how well she uses image, how image opens and opens and you become swept up in it, and suddenly see that you've been privy to an entire story that now, in a way, has become part of your own life. There's much sensuality, some humor, tremendous tenderness and joy.The title poem is stunning, but there are so many other good ones, too.CelloWhen a dead tree falls in a forestit often falls into the armsof a living tree. The dead,thus embraced, rasp in wind,...

One of those "tweeners" hanging in the zone between 3 and 4 because some poems are stronger than others. Although there are all kinds of poems in this short collection, Laux's go-to structure is the single stanza big-boy. It might stretch to two pages but seldom makes it to three. What's attractive about the work is how Laux finds poetry in the prosaic (a fine place to find poetry) -- things like trees, sex (did I say "prosaic"?), ravens, hummingbirds, the moon (of course), Germans, spring, a fa...

Dorianne Laux was one of my favorite discoveries at this year’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her candid, lyrical style and courage to address both everyday and emotionally charged topics in her work brought the crowd (including me) to its feet at the end of her headline reading. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that FACTS ABOUT THE MOON (2007), Laux’s fourth book of poetry, walks this same powerful path. Her subjects here – sex and relationships, nature and traveling, history and mortality, an...

"Forget us. We don't deserve the moon"My copy of this book is littered with blue sticky notes. So many of Laux's poems speak to me even during these weeks of quarantine when my attention span quivers and fails. The Life of Trees, Little Magnolia, Cello, Tonight I Am in Love...I read them aloud over and over again.

No time lost, the opening poem immediately, stunningly, reminds me why Dorianne Laux still ranks among my top three favorite poets and keeps giving the other two a really hard time. “The Life of Trees” swirls me back into memory, all senses remembering. Once again, I am lying in my bed in the dark of a backcountry night, shack on a dirt road, tree branch scratching along the glass pane of my window. … I want to sleepand dream the life of trees, beingsfrom the muted world who carenothing for Mone...

Yes! Finally! A nerd like the rest of us can make beautiful some facts about the moon, learned from the Discovery Channel. And then, of course, as only Dorianne might do: make a metaphor of it that will break our hearts.

Dorianne Laux, like Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton is helping me to fall in love with poetry in a way I honestly never knew I would. The attention to narrative, the caretaking of sound, the placement of text on the page, but most of all the absolute and profound honesty evident in these pages all made me swoon as I read this collection. I literally had to force myself to slow down, to savor each gem of a poem, and then I went through the poems again and again, cultivating

Dorianne Laux combines a deep sense of the pain and tragedy emanating from childhood trauma with an unusual ability to arrive at joy, all embedded in clear spare lyrical lines. I'll juxtapose two passages to provide a sense, the first from "What's Terrible":"....Terrible thing, the family.But not so terrible as being abandonedin a glass room with your suitcase and a bored-off-her-ass stewardess, flipping through the pages of a book your mother gave you before you left,your fractured, frazzled, m...

"Red starburst or purple-edged skirtrolling in the vitreous wavesover the stunted ice-rimmed treetopsor in spring, candles of fireweedand the tiny ice blue flowersof the tundra. Tundra, a wordthat sounds like a thousand cariboupouring down a gorge."

Dorianne Laux's poems are gorgeous moving pictures of an attentive, everyday life. With expert judgment and a true ear for music, Laux brushes through the thorny, face-scratching landscape of death, sex, and the common life, alternating between poems that branch into the past for clarification and insight and those that vine into the vivid, shifting world of the present for clues of how to live and for whom. Laux's poems could be set anywhere, it seems to me, but quite a few take us to the haunt...

Laux is my new mentor. I want to write like she writes. I fell in love with the title poem several years ago, and I wish I would have read this book sooner. Flowing, unpretentious, sometimes heartbreaking poems.

This is one of those books that can be read over and over again to reach the same or different understandings of how it feels to be alive. This fantastic collection of poems is one that has the potential to never cease to resonate with its readers. Readers can feel its charged energy. Without a doubt, this collection will continue again and again to be cherished. The body of shared experience can become part of the reader. Throughout Laux’s work, the question of purpose juxtaposes with desire. H...

Awesome! I love Dorianne's poetry and this book is simply delightful. I had the privilege of hearing her read pieces of this when she was in Rochester, so I have the added pleasure of "hearing" her voice each time I reread bits and pieces of this.

Dorianne Laux is a treasure. She writes the lightness and darkness of living in a way that takes you there. You can almost smell the smell of new mown grass and the sounds of crickets in the evening.