"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. ( )

Glad to read someone who influenced my friends so deeply.

Moon in the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was 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 she just keeps reaching into her own chest, pulling them out, memory after memory, moment after moment, a life lived before our eyes in word and image. She writes about love and sex and it does not annoy me; it delights. That's almost the highest praise I can give to a poet. She loves books and language and it shows. She writes from a place of sorrow and brokenness and yet also boldness and joy and health. I am delighted to see she just had a retrospective collection come out (one of those 'new and selected poems' things), but I really do think I will also be gathering up all her poems, myself, just for me. Mine, mine, mine. All to keep. All to take out from time to time and savor again. All to tell you you really need these poems in your life, too.

( )

I saw Dorianne Laux give a reading of some of these poems at a speaker series at UVA, and she was fabulous. These poems have great voice and are unique and moving, especially the poem "Gasoline" (which is actually not in this collection but is a great poem).

"What's reality/if not a long exhaustive cringe/from the blade, the teeth?"- "The Life of Trees" ( )

I saw Dorianne Laux give a reading of some of these poems at a speaker series at UVA, and she was fabulous. These poems have great voice and are unique and moving, especially the poem "Gasoline" (which is actually not in this collection but is a great poem).

"What's reality/if not a long exhaustive cringe/from the blade, the teeth?"- "The Life of Trees" ( )