From the Publisher: 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”—as well as powerful homages to the poet’s mother and her carpenter’s spirit, Life on Earth urges us all to find extraordinary magic in the mess of ordinary life.

Reviews

“Beautifully constructed exercises in tender yet fierce attention, these poems bear witness to deaths in the family, to climate destruction, and to the ravages of U.S. history, even as they insist on intimacy and wonder.”
—  The New Yorker

“With this spellbinding seventh collection, Laux brings to life the simple pleasures and small agonies of human existence.” — starred review from Publisher’s Weekly