From a modern soldier off to war and a boyfriend who taught her how to drive to Mick Jagger and Superman, Laux's fantastic collection reveals men as human and mortal. The poems are playful, sultry, sexy and also elegiac. This is a collection to be read in one sitting, although you'll stop to catch your breath on numerous occasions at Laux's plain-spoken lyricism and finely tuned attention to detail.

Favorite poems:Roots, Gold, Homicide Detective: A Film Noir, Lighter, Learning to Drive, and Late-Night TV. So a good collection I guess. I dunno, not my favorite. Narrative poems that worked for me, though!Connection: Laux will be teaching at the Tin House Summer Workshop when I will be working there.

Mushrooms and stamens and pollinating bees, all bursting from a man’s briefs … this new collection of poetry by Dorianne Laux, The Book of Men, coming out in February 2011, is as seductive and enticing a literary treat as one has come to expect from one of America’s most delicious poets. If a treatise on boys and men, men on their own, men in the poet’s life, men observed at a distance, men in the moon, then it is also very much a collection for women and by one. Enter Sergeant Metz, first poem,...

Dorianne Laux reveals a potent viewpoint on men in this new collection of poems. She has this remarkable ability to reveal an entire world through one moment, an entire personal history through one encounter or one detail. Her language is bare, stripped of grand literary illusions and metaphors. These poems are incredibly accessible as well and often read as miniature short stories.

Laux is one of my favorite poets. The narrative poems in this collection read like a reminisence of my young adulthood as she considers topics like Viet Nam, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. But it's her treatment of the more mundane that truly rocks my poetic heart, poems like "The Treatment of Backs" and "Antilementation." The latter actually helped explained why I'm finishing a poorly written biography of Bill Clinton. "Regret nothing," writes Laux, "Not the cruel novels you read to the end just t...

Laux is all-her-own grounded and open. There is no one better to write about hot, sweaty nights with men than Dorianne Laux. Laux's book mainly communes with our insecurities about death. Our fear of the unknown is to startle awake under a deep swath of night after the steam of lovemaking has dissipated and the liquid remnants dimly shine in its bed. Like the cover - I noticed the tighty-whitey underwear after carrying the book around for a couple months - each poem's sound builds on itself, the...

Dorianne Laux arrived on the poetry radar already spectacularly good, and one of the great pleasures of reading her books over the years has been seeing how she has kept her core strengths (work whose keel is powerful emotional truth, whose sails' canvas is woven of precise description, amazing metaphors, the just-right heat of word-choice) and gone on to expand them as well, into increasingly ranging subjects and explorations. Each successive book brings its own new flavors; every one of them h...

I am no poetry expert, but "Antilamentation" (heard one morning on NPR Writer's Almanac) struck a chord, and I had to read more, so I bought the book in which it resides. Dorianne is very earthy and makes excellent use of metaphor. Really liked.

I have been reluctant to write a review on Laux's collection of poems because I wanted to address the whole collection. But there is one that embedded itself. One that I call people to hear. One that I use as an example to people who "hate" poetry. One that I (as a writer) will forever use as a standard. It is titled Mother's Day.Laux doesn't write poems that are obscure, poems that intimidate readers. She communicates at the highest levels. The reader not only "gets" the poem, but feels it, exp...

The Book of Men is a delightful collection of funny, whimsical, insightful, honest poems. Laux pays homage to many cultural icons, including Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, and Cher. "The Beatles" starts with Laux saying she "Never really understood why The Beatles/ broke up". She talks about Superman smoking pot as he sits on a tall building. In "Learning to Drive", Laux takes an ordinary right-of-passage and turns it into something magical. The reality of seeing an aging parent try to negotiate Costco...

The Book of Men reflects "stories" from her life and relationships. She writes from experiences in a natural voice that anyone can understand. I believe one of the most natural reads for me since I started reading poetry. Her feminine viewpoint is quite insightful to the male viewpoint, understanding what most women can't about the male psyche, even experienced women. The book is not all testosterone driven though. She touches on the vietnam war, pop icons like superman, music icons like Cher an...

This book has more pink underlines than flesh.She knows I love her, and that I'm at a creepy, pre-teen, boyband level with her writing. So, what more can I say than she's magic.

I wrote one poem and started two others while I read this book over the course of a couple of hours. The compliment to Dorianne Laux inherent to that is this: She made me pay attention. She made me remember that every single thing has earned a poem, if someone wants to write it one. The poems in this collection are narrative in nature, and are not so much glittery as they are dusty, which I also mean as a compliment. Laux writes lived-in poems, about the past, the summer, cars, sex, the horses a...

for national poetry month i’m reading this book of poems by dorianne laux. these are poems about men of all kinds. something that strikes me about these them is how honest they are. this is my first introduction to dorianne laux & i will definitely read more of her work. also, i must have picked this book up at least 10x before I realized the flora on the cover is bursting from a pair of men’s undershorts. clever, that.

You've walked those streets a thousand times and stillyou end up here. Regret none of it, not oneof the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,when the lights from the carnival rideswere the only stars you believed in, loving themfor their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a houseafter the TV set has been pitched out the window.Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.Relax. Don't bother re...

Love her work! This book was a perfect combination between somber and humor. I’ll be reading more of Laux’s work!

Review of Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men“Regret nothing,” begins a poem in Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men: “Regret none of it, not one/ of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,/ when the lights from the carnival rides/ were the only stars you believed in, loving them/ for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.” These lines from “Antilamentation” feel essential to this very courageous collection of poems, which read like hymns to the intrinsic value of struggle, hard work, and litera...

The first half of The Book of Men is exactly that, a series of poems about men of all kinds, from the itinerant to the wealthy, bohemian to the iconic suburbanite. Some are well-known, like Mick Jagger and Superman. Others, like the poet Philip Levine, aren't so famous. Some are general portraits, like the film noir detective.More subtly, the 2d half seems to be about women, especially mothers. Mothers, breasts, children recur here. There's even a poen entitled "Mother's Day," along with others

At the emergency room, I read The Book of Men, then hand it to my wife, who is wired to a couple of machines. She says, Oh my, these are wonderful, and I agree and think, yes, these are poems for the people of planet Earth, for those who wait tables in Juneau, Alaska in order to buy a bed, who go off to war in place of those who send them, for whom gold is the “color of mold in the broken refrigerator” rather than a smart investment, and for whom language crafted to speak truly and memorably of

Really a beautiful collection of poems with a unique voice.