Books

From the Publisher: 

Dorianne Laux’s long-awaited third book of poetry follows her collection, What We Carry, a finalist for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In Smoke, Laux revisits familiar themes of family, working class lives and the pleasures of the body in poetry that is vital and artfully crafted—poetry that “gets hard in the face of aloofness,” in the words of one reviewer. A s in her previous work, Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary lives into extraordinary and complex tapestries. In “The Shipfitter’s Wife,” a woman recalls her husband’s homecoming at the end of his work day: "Then I’d open his clothes and take the whole day inside me--the ship’s gray sides, the miles of copper pipe, the voice of the foreman clanging off the hull’s silver ribs. Spark of lead kissing metal. The clamp, the winch, the white fire of the torch, the whistle, and the long drive home." And in the title poem, Laux muses on her own guilty pleasures: "Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat’s eye in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke, the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries of living things. Alone, you are almost safe . . .." With her keen ear and attentive eye, Dorianne Laux offers us a universe with which we are familiar, but gives it to us fresh.

Praise for Smoke: 

"The largely domestic and narrative poems of Laux's Smoke shift between internal and external landscapes." 

—Publisher's Weekly

"The poems of Laux's new collection are bound together by images of smoke and fire--tightly, but never so tightly as to seem restrained or constrained. Laux's expansive style opens up each poem, so that we move beyond its situation into a wilder, more extreme place."

—Booklist