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More on Fiction & Poetry from The Atlantic Monthly.

From Atlantic Unbound:

"Henry Clay's Mouth" (1999)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball" (1998)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"He Has Lived In Many Houses" (1996)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"Torn Shades" (1996)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"Gorgeous Surfaces" (1994)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"Virgule" (1992)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

"Snake Lake" (1984)
A poem by Thomas Lux, accompanied by a reading in RealAudio.

Also by Peter Swanson:

"Maus Culture" (March 29, 2001)
From DC and Marvel to the latest wave of serious graphic novels, the comic book has come of age.

Previously in Interviews:

"Character Is Action" (December 3, 2004)
Margot Livesey talks about her new novel, Banishing Verona, and her commitment to writing literary page-turners. By Jessica Murphy.

"Gilead's Balm" (November 17, 2004)
Marilynne Robinson talks about her long-awaited second novel and the holiness of the everyday. By Jennie Rothenberg.

"Into the Den of Spies" (November 9, 2004)
Mark Bowden, the author of "Among the Hostage-Takers," speaks about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 and its architects' present-day struggles with the Islamic regime. By Terrence Henry.

"Iraq's Walled City" (October 13, 2004)
William Langewiesche, the author of "The Green Zone," on the dangerous and ever-increasing isolation of the American presence in Baghdad. By Elizabeth Shelburne.

"Imagined Homelands" (October 4, 2004)
Chitra Divakaruni, author of Queen of Dreams, talks about the immigrant experience, magic realism, and incorporating 9/11 into her fiction. By Susan Comninos.

"A Tragedy of Errors" (September 20, 2004)
James Fallows, the author of "Bush's Lost Year," describes the road to Iraq as a case study in "failed decision-making" By Elizabeth Shelburne.

Atlantic Unbound | December 8, 2004

Interviews

Details, Details

The poet Thomas Lux talks about rendering the unruly stuff of life into metaphors that stick

.....

book cover

The Cradle Place
[Click the title
to buy this book]

by Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin
96 pages, $22.00

cursory look at any of the eight full-length books of poetry that Thomas Lux has published since the early 1970s will yield an extraordinary array of subject matter. Crack a spine and you'll be confronted with an ode to the virgule, or to the limbic system, or a poem simply titled "Commercial Leech Farming Today," that is, refreshingly, about commercial leech farming today. Lux's latest collection, The Cradle Place, has poems devoted to national impalement statistics, to the ice worm, to the dung beetle. More impressive than the range of Lux's poetic feelers, however, is the way in which he distills these subjects into the original and striking metaphors that run through his disarming poems. Take, for instance, Lux's description of a gletz, the flaw inside a diamond, as "these breathless, cell-sized cells / where two inmates are locked / and each has a knife."

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Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

More Interviews in Atlantic Unbound.

Peter Swanson is a writer based in Boston. He received an M.F.A. in poetry from Emerson College. His article on comics and graphic novels appeared in The Atlantic Online.