Thomas Lux: selected poems 1982-2012.

After starting out as a neo-surrealist American poet in the 1970s, Thomas Lux 'drifted away from surrealism and the arbitrariness of all that.

I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui.' The later Lux writes more directly in response to more familiar but no less strange human experience, creating a body of work that is at once simple and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant.

He uses humour or satire 'to help combat the darkness to make the reader laugh - and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humour.' Each of Lux's multi-faceted poems is self-contained, whether it is musing or ranting, lamenting or lambasting, first person personal or first person universal. 'Usually, the speaker of my poems is a little agitated,' says Lux, 'a little smart-ass, a little angry, satirical, despairing. Or, sometimes he's goofy, somewhat elegiac, full of praise and gratitude.' 'The latest collection of dazzlers from one of the few poets writing today who fills me with envy.

Lux is such an antidote to the post-confessional poetry thats all about your broken heart Hes interested in history, geology, oceanography.

His poems are based on the world, though Im sure hes writing about himself' - Billy Collins. 'Simultaneously funny, sad, ironic, compassionate, mocking and spiritual.

There is such emotional and tonal range...yet a definite common-sense, serio-comic down-to-earthiness lurks throughout the collection as if implying that we humans should know better, be above all the nonsense to which we seem endlessly addicted' - Sally Molini, Cerise Press.