Bøker av Dorianne Laux

Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux returns with an insightful, compassionate, and spirited volume that celebrates the imperfect miracle of humanity.

From "a poet of immense insight and masterful craft" (Kwame Dawes), Finger Exercises for Poets is an engaging and inspiriting invitation to practice poetry alongside one of its masters. With wide-ranging examples from classic and contemporary poets, Dorianne Laux demystifies the magic of language that makes great poetry and offers generative exercises to harness that magic. She explores the syllable and the line, the use of form, poetic responses to contemporary events and personal experiences, the imaginative leap, and the power of a distinct voice. As she writes in the introduction, "My instrument is the immensity of language.... There are eighty-eight keys on a piano, six hundred thousand words in the English language. The patterns, sequences, and permutations of both are endless. For me, language is another kind of music.... I practice poetry. This book invites you to practice along with me."Throughout, Laux reminds us that poetry is a practice as much as an art and that poets must hone their language as a musician practicing an instrument.

Dorianne Laux's fifth collection of poetry peels back time to the summer of love and the Vietnam War. Her keen hindsight uncovers the humanity at the center of conflict with language that goes straight to the heart. This work stands as an elegy for the loss of innocence, an homage to the glimmer underneath the urban grunge, and a love song to the imperfections that unite and divide us. Laux possesses what Tony Hoagland calls "the brave art of looking," with an immediate and compassionate touch.

A collection of new and selected works from a prize-winning poet known to bear compassionate and ruthless witness to the quotidian.

Laux weaves the warp and woof of ordinary life into extraordinary and complex tapestries.

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."-Philip Levine

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."-Philip Levine