A prodigious imagination that somehow manages to sift through the ordinary, quotidian, and squalid realities of our world, to produce moments of grace and shimmering beauty, and empathetic illumination. Dorianne Laux is a national treasure, a poet of immense insight and masterful craft. Only as the Day Is Long is a tour de force, a work of striking beauty and humanity--a work for its own time.--Kwame Dawes, author of City of Bones: A Testament Throughout the years and throughout her five books Dorianne Laux has not faltered. She has wrestled with the angels and with the serpents, eros and thanatos are wrestling still, and the sound they make is the sound of this woman singing.--Marie Howe, author of Magdalene Dorianne Laux's Only The Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems gifts the reader with a foundation that bears the true weight of life and death. Each trope rises out of lived feeling--everyday rituals bend toward the sacred as beauty peers through a pure, honest language. Here, at the heart of mastery, is an American voice paying dues through tribute.

These poems dare to sing and cross borders, in step with the natural and universal.--Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Emperor of Water Clocks Another splendid new one by one of our best, who never stops paying attention, and is never unwilling, and summons from her readers unwavering trust.--Mark Doty, author of Deep Lane In a vast ocean of too-much-to-read out there, I can always find an island of sanity in Laux's work, and within individual poems, always, always spots of light and breath and truth.--Lia Purpura, author of It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful Dorianne Laux is one of those poets I turn to again and again for cradling beauty and darkness so close together in a poem.--Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic.