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Rating: 
Summary: raw emotion
Review: Dorianne Laux is a wonderful poet. I associate her with Kim Addonzio because of there manual on poetry the wrote together, The Poet's Companion, because they are friends, and because their work has a similar feel (though Laux doesn't write in meter and rhyme like Kim does sometimes). There is this raw emotion, but not just flopped on the page like so much bad poetry. In reading this collection, you see what a craftsman Laux is. Her poems feel raw, they feel spontaneous, but they are finely tuned pieces of art. The book is divided into two sections, Smoke and Fire. The first section, Smoke, is the stronger section, with poems like "Ray at 14", "Prayer" "How It Will Happen, When" and others. The poems here feel like smoke when you read them. They touch you lightly, but powerfully, bringing forth all these images, sounds, smells, feelings. Like smoke, they sneak up on you, and then hurt you. "What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth. Your life
rising behind them. Your name on her lips."
--Prayer "Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip"
--Death comes to me again, a girl The second section doesn't differ much. The poems don't come raging at you like fire. No burning here. They are much more like smoke, but it does contain some great work, and has "The Shipfitter's Wife," a beautiful poem that was selected for the Best American Poetry 1999 by Robert Bly. I'm just surprised more of her work hasn't appeared there.
Rating: 
Summary: awake, with feeling
Review: i was drawn to this book mainly because i have read laux's work before in anthologies. i loved the poems in this book because she writes poignantly about the everyday things in life and she takes on taboo subjects like sex and death and domestic violence and give them dignity. i am definately going to check out other works by her
Rating:
Summary: awake, with feeling
Review: i was drawn to this book mainly because i have read laux's work before in anthologies. i loved the poems in this book because she writes poignantly about the everyday things in life and she takes on taboo subjects like sex and death and domestic violence and give them dignity. i am definately going to check out other works by her
Rating:
Summary: raw
Review: there's something different about this collection of laux's poetry. unlike her other books, there's this sense of the unrefined rawness of loss. things aren't as smooth as in _awake_ and _what we carry_. in fact, sometimes her words are jarring, difficult to swallow, painful to read. while technically, these poems don't seem as refined and polished as the ones in her other two collections, these seem to tap into an emotional realness, an intensity, which her other two books don't.
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