Publisher description for The cradle place / Thomas Lux.
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The fifty-five poems in Thomas Lux"s new collection bring to full life the "refreshing iconoclasms" Rita Dove so admired in his earlier work. His voice is plainspoken but moody, both humorous and edgy, and always surprising. Lux has long been an advocate for the relevance of poetry in American culture. His new poems are intelligent but not bookish or attached to any particular ideology.
These are poems that ask questions about language and intention, about the sometimes untidy connections between the human and
natural worlds. In the poem "Terminal Lake," Lux undermines notions of benign nature, finding dark undercurrents beneath the surface: "it"s
a huge black coin, / it"s as if the real lake is drained / and this lake is the drain: gaping, language- / less, suck- and sinkhole." In the ominous "Render, Render," the narrator asks us to consider a concentration of the essences of our lives: all that is physical, spiritual, remembered, and dreamed for, melded together to make the messy self we present to the world. The Cradle Place is a testament to Thomas Lux"s exciting voice, his unflinching gaze.
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