Life on Earth: Poems

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity. In her seventh collection, Dorianne Laux once again offers poems that move us, include us, and appreciate us fully as the flawed humans we are. Life on Earth is a book of praise for our planet and ourselves, delivered with Lauxs trademark vitality, frank observation, and earthy wisdom. With odes to the unlikely and elementalsalt, snow, crows, cups, Bisquick, a shovel and rake, the ubiquitous can of WD-40, the way / it releases the caught cogs / of the worldLife on Earth urges us all to find extraordinary magic in the mess of ordinary life. One of our most daring contemporary poets (Diana Whitney, San Francisco Chronicle), Laux balances wonder at the night sky and the taste of a ripe peach with recognition of the sharp knife of mortality. The volume includes powerful homages to the poets mother and her carpenters spirit, reflections on loss and aging, and encounters with the fleeting beauty of the natural world. Transcending lifes inevitable moments of pain and uncertainty, Life on Earth instructs us in our own endless possibilities and the astonishing riches of the world around us.