Half Promised Land

The world displayed in the poems of Thomas Lux is a fairly dangerous place, a half promised land, a region where turtles languish of thirst, where a lifebuoy crawls with spiders, where a moving car hits a moving moose and both survive, where what tends to terrify us tends also to make us feel safe, where "rattlesnakes feel at home,” where "your belief in justice/merges with your belief in dreams." In these searing and empathetic poems, Lux charts a landscape that is both familiar and unnervingly strange. Surreal Imagery: Witness a world where tarantulas cling to lifebuoys and a collision between a car and a moose ends not in tragedy, but in mutual survival. Dark Humor: Discover a wry, unsentimental humor in poems about childhood pranks with electric fences and the strange etiquette of the afterlife. Observational Poetry: A tribute to the small towns, overlooked moments, and quiet lives of a distinctly American landscape, rendered with unflinching clarity. Contemporary American Poetry: A masterwork from a defining voice in late 20th-century poetry, perfect for readers of James Wright, Charles Simic, and Philip Levine.