Books

From the Publisher: 

A collection of new and selected works from a prize-winning poet known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian. Drawing from five expansive volumes and including twenty new pieces,  Only as the Day Is Long  represents an astonishing, confident, and daring body of work from one of our most accomplished poets. Philip Levine praises Dorianne Laux for her poetry’s “enormous precision and beauty,” and B. H. Fairchild proclaims that her poems are “brought to the hard edge of meaning.” The new poems are odes to Laux’s mother, an extraordinary and ordinary woman of the Depression era. Exploring experiences of survival and healing, sexual love and celebration,  Only as the Day Is Long  shows Laux at the height of her powers.

Praise for Only As The Day Is Long: 

"Laux, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her 1994 book “What We Carry,” shows us how to endure hardships without losing humanity and compassion. This timely, beautifully crafted collection wonderfully balances light and dark."

 — The Washington Post

“Another splendid new one by one of our best, who never stops paying attention, and is never unwilling, and summons from her readers unwavering trust.”

—Mark Doty

“Dorianne Laux is one of those poets I turn to again and again for cradling beauty and darkness so close together in a poem.”

— Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"In a vast ocean of too-much-to -read out there, I can always find an island of sanity in her work and, within individual poems, always, always  spots of light and breath and truth."

— Lia Purpura

"Our good fortune is not that she was born into opulence or privilege (she wasn’t) but that she has been gifted with a prodigious imagination that somehow manages to sift through the ordinary, quotidian, and squalid realities of our world, to produce moments of grace and shimmering beauty, and empathetic illumination.  Dorianne Laux is a national treasure, a poet of immense insight and masterful craft, who, in channeling her mentor Phil Levine’s admonitions to her, produced her own endorsement: 'To be yourself in your own time, to stand up/ That poetry was precision, raw precision/ Truth and compassion: genius.' Only as the Day Is Long. is a tour de force, a work of striking beauty and humanity—a work for its own time."

— Kwame Dawes, author of  City of Bones: A Testament

"This is a catalogue of honest work, from beginning to end."

—  Publisher's Weekly, starred review

“Life is a carnival, people are wildly busy, there are love affairs to be pursued, arguments to be waged, omelets to be made, gardens to be tended, plus ballgames, movies, auctions, bike trips, and poetry is very patient. Emily Dickinson has waited 120-some years for you to read "Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed," and she can wait a few more years. Same with Walt Whitman, same with Dorianne Laux, Billy Collins, Philip Booth, Maxine Kumin, May Swenson, and all the others. They'll be around. You will catch up with them eventually." 

— Garrison Keillor, AARP

"Laux’s work has always felt subversive in its unapologetic celebration of female sexuality, but now she proves herself one of our most daring contemporary poets with Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. . .From formal sonnets to narrative sequences, Laux’s rhythmic lines merge song with story and illuminate the nature of grief and loss. . .Laux anchors her poems in sensory details, transforming simple acts into lyric moments. We’re lucky. Only as the Day Is Long gives us Laux’s lyric powers evolving over the course of her career, resonant with courage and compassion."  

—Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle

"Celebrated and sought-after throughout the years, there is something about a Dorianne Laux poem that will delight and haunt you until the end of days. Her new book Only As the Day is Long: New & Selected is a heart-breaking collection of poems that will force you to remember your own old loves, first wounds, jobs in which you struggled or thrived, the complex relationship with family, with class, the mother figure, and through it all you’ll remember what fierceness feels like in the bones, why life is worth fighting for every hard step of the way."

 — "17 of the Best Poetry Books, as Recommended by Acclaimed Writers for National Poetry Month" selection by Ada Limón for The Oprah Magazine

"... unflinching ... Helpless but not hapless, [Laux] deftly writes of heartbreak—the absolute, gutting, severe loss of the one who brought her into this world ... Laux is majestic ... The elegies accumulate, settle into our throats, drill down—her selected poems are gorgeous to revisit, but these new pieces are symphonic—and they become a perfect coda of grief." 

— Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions

"[I've been savoring Dorianne Laux's Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. . . [I] was blown away by the newer poems about her mother in particular. You may want this book on your bedside table this summer, too. I know it will stay on mine—with a pen close by." 

— Maggie Smith, Kenyon Review

"Laux writes with startling directness of the physical and sexual abuse she and her sister suffered at the hands of her father ... But there are other poems, just as frank and openhearted, that celebrate the wondrousness of sex (so skillfully that fiction writers should take note) ... Beyond her admirable tenacity and spirit, Laux is just plain wise — and refreshingly unpretentious in her wisdom ... Laux’s new poems arrive at the end of the collection as a perfect finale, which benefits from what we now know of her life ... [Laux's poems allow us to] understand the bewildering complexity of this act of posthumous forgiveness, as well as the staggering generosity of the poet who committed it." 

— Jonathan Russel Clark, Vulture

"The ability to write accessible poetry is proof that Laux is an expert. She captures human sentiment and weaves emotions into multisensory landscapes with accurate details. Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems is a collection of Laux's finest. . .A necessary addition to a home library."

—Andrew Jarvis, New York Journal of Books