Dorianne Laux

Dorianne Laux (b. 10 January 1952, Augusta, Maine) is a poet who came to literature late and from below — she worked as a maid, a sanatorium cook, a gas station attendant, and a donut shop worker before attending Mills College in her thirties, and her poetry carries the weight of that experience. She writes about the body, about physical labor, about sex and childbirth and housework, with a frank sensuousness and a refusal to prettify that distinguish her from the genteel tradition of American nature poetry and from the ironic distance of much contemporary verse.

Life and Career

Laux grew up in Maine in a working-class family. She became a single mother in her early twenties and spent the next decade working a series of low-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs that most American poets know about only from reading about them. She enrolled at Mills College in Oakland, California, in her thirties, an experience she has described as transformative. She went on to study with poets including Philip Levine, whose working-class sensibility and respect for manual labor deeply influenced her work.

She has taught creative writing at the University of Oregon and at Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. With Kim Addonizio, she co-authored The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997), which has become one of the most widely used poetry craft books in America — clear, practical, and unpretentious, like Laux’s own work.

Poetry

Awake (1990, BOA Editions) — her debut, published when she was thirty-eight — announced a poet of unusual directness and physical presence. The poems are rooted in the body: in the experience of menstruation, sex, pregnancy, nursing, cleaning, cooking. Laux writes about these subjects not as metaphors for something else but as experiences that deserve attention in their own right. “What I Wouldn’t Do” — a poem listing the jobs she has worked — is a statement of poetic identity: the poet as laborer, the poem as an extension of physical work.

What We Carry (1994) — a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award — deepened her range. The poems address her father’s alcoholism, her daughter’s growing up, her relationships with men, and the landscape of working-class America with a precision that never tips into sentimentality. The collection is more formally varied than Awake and more willing to take risks with structure and voice.

Smoke (2000) explores addiction, desire, and the body’s pleasures and dangers with the frankness that characterizes all of Laux’s work. Facts About the Moon (2006) — winner of the Oregon Book Award — is her most accomplished collection, balancing the personal (poems about her mother, her daughter, her lovers) with the observational (poems about strangers, landscapes, natural phenomena). The title poem — a list of facts about the moon that becomes a meditation on knowledge, wonder, and the limits of understanding — is one of her signature works.

The Book of Men (2012) and Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (2019) confirm her stature. Only as the Day Is Long gathers poems from across her career and reveals the consistency of her vision: a poetry grounded in the physical world, in the body’s experience, in the working life that most American poetry ignores.

Themes and Critical Standing

Laux’s great subject is the body — specifically, the female body as a site of labor, pleasure, pain, and knowledge. She writes in the tradition of Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, and Philip Levine: poets who insist that the body’s experiences — sex, work, aging, illness — are worthy of the same serious attention that other poets give to ideas, landscapes, or myths.

Her poetry is sometimes called “confessional,” but the label is misleading. Laux is not interested in confession as performance or catharsis; she is interested in the precise rendering of experience — in getting the physical details right, in making the reader feel the weight of a mop, the heat of a kitchen, the texture of skin. The specificity is the art.

She is one of the most important teacher-poets in America — her influence extends through her students at Oregon and Pacific, through The Poet’s Companion, and through the example of a career that proves you do not need an Ivy League education or a literary family to write poems that matter.

Key Works

• Awake (1990)
• What We Carry (1994) — NBCC finalist
• Facts About the Moon (2006) — Oregon Book Award
• Only as the Day Is Long (2019)

Collecting Laux

Awake first edition (BOA Editions, 1990) brings $30–$60; signed copies $50–$100. BOA Editions is a small press, making early printings genuinely scarce. What We Carry (BOA, 1994) brings $20–$40. Later collections (W.W. Norton) bring $10–$25. Laux signs at poetry readings and university events. The Poet’s Companion (Norton, 1997) is widely available and not collected for value, but it is an essential companion to the poetry.