Longlisted for the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry
One of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024
Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity.
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.
About the author
Dorianne Laux’s poetry collections include Only as the Day Is Long, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. She is the coauthor of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. A founding faculty member of Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program, she lives in Richmond, California.
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