Readers familiar with Thomas Luxs quick-witted images ("e;Language without simile is like a lung/ without air"e;) and his rambunctious, Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination ("e;The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers"e;) will find in his new collection, Child Made of Sand, not only the signature funny, provocative, and poignant super-surrealism that has made him, along with Charles Simic, James Tate, and Dean Young, one of Americas most inventive and humane poets, but they will also find in a surprising series of homages, elegies, rants, and autobiographical poems a new register of language in which time and mortality echo and reverberate in quieter notes. In "e;West Shining Tree,"e; we can hear this shift in register when he asks: "e;Ill head dead West and ask of all I see:/ Which is the way, the long or the short way,/ to the West Shining Tree?"e;

Thomas Lux has published twelve books of poems, including Split Horizon, for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Award. A former Guggenheim fellow and a recipient of three NEA grants, he holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.