Child Made of Sand

📖 The Scoop

Readers familiar with Thomas Lux's quick-witted images ("Language without simile is like a lung / without air") and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers") will find in his new collection, Child Made of Sand, not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant imaginative realism that has made him one of America's most inventive and humane poets, but also will find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "West Shining Tree," we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "I'll head dead West and ask of all I see: / Which is the way, the long or the short way, / to the West Shining Tree?" Child Made of Sand, Lux's twelfth full-length book of poems, demonstrates a restless energy to explore new territory, while confirming his place in the pantheon of contemporary American poetry.

Genre: Poetry / General (fancy, right?)