Books
Facts About The Moon
W. W. Norton & Company, May 2007, Paperback
Paperback, 5.5 × 8.3 in, 104 pages, ISBN 978-0-393-32962-9
From the publisher: In her powerful fourth collection, Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time.
Praise for Facts About The Moon:
"To understand why her work is so widely read and admired, listen to the music Dorianne Laux makes, line after line....She is quick-witted and compassionate, with a genius for phrasing that never compromises the perfect clarity of her text....Continually engaging and, at her best, luminous.”
—Steve Kowit, San Diego Union-Tribune
"Laux’s fourth collection of poems gives us more of what we have come to love and crave from this poet: startlingly distinctive vocabulary, sensual engagement with the body, and beautiful articulation of the ranges of human life coupled with a commitment to the details of particular human lives."
—Lilah Hegnauer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2006
"Laux's fluent and likable first person shoots straight on sex, relationships and American adulthood in this substantial and unusually various fourth collection."
—Publisher's Weekly
"Speaking with authority from the first page, this collection is accessible, familiar, the poet’s trenchant observations sitting like pearls upon the tongue."
—Curled Up With A Good Book
"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."
—Philip Levine
"Facts About the Moon is a splendid book of enchanting poems that make one feel the ‘lunar strength and brutal pull’ of love that exists in spite of our human frailty. In those frailties lie our strengths. Dorianne Laux knows this and her poems show it."
—Ai
"Dorianne Laux has created an ever-expanding body of work in which the examined life is the common one, recognizable and shared, yet also transformed-each statement, feeling, fact set down with accuracy, original vision, and an unerring musicality and alertness. Facts About the Moon continually surprises and enriches. In its rhetorical clarity, emotional honesty, lyric beauty, attention to detail, and moral encounter with the world, this volume is a rewarding and powerful achievement."
—Jane Hirshfield
"These poems represent a knowledge, and a sensibility, that is unmistakable, and a lyric loveliness that springs from that knowledge. I loved reading them and I praise them to the sky."
—Gerald Stern