Child Made of Sand

<p>Reader's familiar with Thomas Lux's quick-witted images (Language without simile is like a lung/ without air) and his rambunctious Cirque-Du-Soleil-like imagination (The Under-Appreciated Pontooniers) will find in his new collection <i>Child Made of Sand</i> 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 America's 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 West Shining Tree we can hear this shift in register when he asks: I'll head dead West and ask of all I see: / Which is the way the long or the short way / to the West Shining Tree?