Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Lauren Gilmore has more maturity, discipline, and skill than most writers three times her age. Outdancing the Universe is a portrait of an artist coming to terms with her personal history, a cartography of the strips of land she has called home, and a complex elegy for the people who inhabited it with her. Equal parts hilarious and haunting, sweet and misanthropic, terse and elaborate in a first-rate, free-verse style, it is a serious book that needs to be read by serious people who care about Pacific Northwest literature and beyond." —Robert Lashley, author of The Homeboy Songs
Review
"Lauren Gilmore is a goddamned prodigy! She takes on childhood and love and grief and sex and twists them into poems so beautiful and powerful I want to pin them to my heart and wear them around. I will go back to this collection again and again, and each time I will come away changed." —Kris Dinnison, author of You and Me and Him
Description
“Everyone talking over each other—radios tuned to different stations.”
There are no bows in this collection. Lauren Gilmore gives readers poems that grapple with life's loose ends. Outdancing the Universe is for those who “have always slept best between mile markers.” She chronicles how illusory “home” can often be, and the quiet frustration that comes from seeking it. Gilmore welcomes you to the human race—“the only species masochistic enough / to keep track of time.”