Foreclosure

Literature & Fiction

Lawless, Gregory

Poetry

Back Pages Books

Poetry. "Gregory Lawless is a visionary of fallen satellites, making revelations of scrap and stray: exiles, astronauts, scarecrows, a gnome, a daughter who will not speak, a pet gryphon and pet rock that 'gets dizzy on the plains.' Formally varying from tight whirlpooling musics to looser prose constructions, the strange incantations of these splendid poems, 'in my last life I came back as a mountain,' convey a yearning for the possibility of the mythic in the everyday countered by a wry humor and intelligence that has its doubts. Maybe the sleet in depressed steel towns that falls in 'I Thought I Was New Here' should be proof and consolation enough. And of these visions that provide such a plentitude of amazement--I think this poet agrees with Rimbaud--at least we've had them'--Dean Young.

I Thought I was New Here

BlazeVOX Books

<p>What I can't figure out about Gregory Lawless's new collection of poems, Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania, is how he did it. This is a book about family, about sorrow and love and joy and people and fun. It's a community book. A book about community. You open this book, to any poem, and are faced with this question: How do I put it down? Because you can feel and see yourself in the work. Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is hard to put down. Honestly, I don't know if this place exists in the real world but Lawless is such a tremendous poet that it's difficult to think that it doesn't. Actually, it doesn't matter. Somewhere in that space between a dream and not-a-dream is the place where these poems take root, "where the buses are powered / by the collective goodwill / of the people the litter / is beautiful most everyone recycles / and we think about death / only once in a great while." I couldn't put this book down. You won't be able to put it down either. --Matthew Lippman<br />
Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is a world both hilarious and heartbreaking, familiar and utterly new. Here, we meditate upon family, mortality, agency; we come to recognize the vivid and the absurd as harbingers of truth. Here, we are human, which is bewildering and beautiful; we would not trade places with the angels, "bored to death by everything / they understand." "I notice / all the birds and things not noticing me, // but I'm too half brokenhearted not / to notice them back," writes Lawless, and we are grateful that he notices and that he shares Dreamsburgh's terror and tenderness with us. --Dora Malech<br />
Taciturn, hilarious, strange and true -- Gregory Lawless's poems are funny like Jack Handey and big-hearted like Denis Johnson. I'd trust no one else to take me to Dreamburgh and steer me through the traffic. --Jack Christian</p>

Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania

Dream Horse Press

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Books by Lawless, Gregory