Synopses & Reviews
Thomas Lux's poems embody the sound of deep emotions lightly carried. In their deft, sometimes humorous fashion they unseat the spirit, fastening on the rueful and mysterious poignancies of our lives, like that unopened bottle of maraschino cherries abandoned in the refrigerator, or cocking a snook at the dreadful challenges of commercial leech farming today. For the past twenty-five years, Lux's work has grown from his early experiments in surrealism into a body of work that, while challenging the mind and affecting the funnybone, is designed to touch the heart, a destination Lux attains with the utmost precision and delicacy. This book for the first time brings together in one volume the best of his mature work.
Review
"singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion." Publishers Weekly
Review
"singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion." Publishers Weekly
Whole worlds of possibility and exchange . . . Lux's most ambitious poems mix rage and rapture." The Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
One of the New York Public Library's 25 "Books to Remember" in 1997 Lux comments on the absurd, the pathetic, and the commonplace in our culture, writing with compassion as well as satire. He is "singular among his peers in his ability to convey with a deceptive lightness the paradoxes of human emotion," says Publishers Weekly, and Robert Hass, in the Washington Post Book World, takes special note of Lux's "bitter wit, the kind of irony that comes with a quick, impatient intelligence."
About the Author
THOMAS LUX holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.