Dorianne laux biography books

Smoke

Who would want to give it up, the coal a cat's eye
in the dark room, no one there but you and your smoke,
the window cracked to street sounds, the distant cries
of living things. Alone, you are almost safe, smoke
slipping out between the sill and the glass, sucked
into the night you don't dare enter, its eyes drunk
and swimming with stars. Somewhere a dumpster
is ratcheted open by the claws of a black machine.
All down the block something inside you opens
and shuts. Sinister screech, pneumatic wheeze,
trash slams into the chute: leftovers, empties.
You don't flip on the TV or the radio, what might
muffle the sound of car engines backfiring,
and in the silence between, streetlights twitching
from green to red, scoff of footsteps, the rasp
of breath, your own, growing lighter and lighter
as you inhale. There's no music for this scarf
of smoke wrapped around your shoulders, its fingers
crawling the pale stem of your neck, no song
light enough, liquid enough, that climbs high enough,
then thins and disappears. Death's shovel scrapes
the sidewalk, critches across the man-made cracks,
slides on grease into rain-filled gutters, digs
its beveled nose among the ravaged leaves.
You can hear him weaving his way down the street,
sloshed on the last breath he swirled past his teeth
before swallowing: breath of the cat kicked
to the curb, a woman's sharp gasp, lung-filled wail
of the shaken child. You can't put it out, can't stamp out
the light and let the night enter you, let it burrow through
your smallest passages. So you listen and listen
and smoke and give thanks, suck deep with the grace
of the living, blowing halos and nooses and zeros
and rings, the blue chains linking around your head.
Then you pull it in again, the vein-colored smoke
and blow it up toward a ceiling you can't see
where it lingers like a sweetness you can never hold,
like the ghost the night will become.

"Smoke" read by the author

“At Work” is a series that highlights Saint Mary’s faculty and staff at work in the world. Artists, writers, scholars, scientists—we sit down and dive deep into their latest projects.

As a poet and a person, Dorianne Laux has long cared about the little things. Her most recent collection, Life on Earth, treats the quotidian with keen observation, turning everyday objects—be they Bisquick, crows, or a can of WD-40—into symbols of cosmic importance. It’s this attentiveness that earned her collection a coveted spot on the longlist for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry. “[Life on Earth] invites us to consider that even the most ordinary aspects of our messy humanity can be worthy of poetry,” said the National Book Awards announcement in September. 

The author of six poetry collections and two craft books, Laux is also a 2024–25 Visiting Writer for Saint Mary’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. While Life on Earth did not make the shortlist, Laux certainly has received plenty of recognition over her decades-long career. Her awards include the Paterson Poetry Prize and the Oregon Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 

Laux kicked off this semester’s Visiting Writers Series in September with an afternoon reading, sharing selected poems from Life on Earth and elsewhere. Written during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic, the collection carries clear influences from that time while also dipping into personal history, including her Acadian ancestry, as well as her relationship with her mother and late brother. In the title poem, “Life on Earth,” she marvels at the sheer chance of our existence: 

When you think you might be
through with this body and soul, look down
at an anthill or up at the stars, rem