Child Made of Sand Poems [Hardcover]

Reader’s 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 super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of America’s most inventive and humane poets, but they will also 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?

InChild Made of Sand,Kingsley Tufts–winner Thomas Lux demonstrates a restless energy to explore new territory while confirming his place in the pantheon of contemporary American poetry.

The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears

always leave quenched,
though they’re drinking,
in composition, seawater,
which does not make them insane
as it does parched humans when
we drink it, even
with our big, big bodies.
If you knew
a leper’s tears do not contain
the bacillus leprae,
would you let him weep on your chest?
Let the moths come, let the sandwoman and -man come,
let Morpheus and Dreamadum come
unto me, and my beloveds,
let the moths come
and drink of the disburdening waters.

Elegy

—César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday,
  April 15, 1938

It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you.
Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too.
No doubt Juana Vásquez was killed.
The killers, poor also, were skilled.
And Emilio, theyl#: