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 unnervi...