Without Wings

The poems collected in Without Wings, like the poems in Laurie Lamon’s first collection, The Fork Without Hunger, reflect the belief that poems use language to point us toward the world that is often overlooked – the world of stillness, the world where points of vital connection tremble and come into being – the world of things as they are, without prejudice, rationalization, and verbal clutter.

The subjects of the poems in Without Wings include the observable and un-observable mysteries that live plainly before us; the poems desire to see with a kind of clarity that is fatal to illusion, that is, to discover what is. Here is history and epiphany.

Laurie Lamon’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines including The Atlantic, The New Republic, Arts & LettersJournal of Contemporary Culture, Plume, Ploughshares, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Innisfree Poetry Journal, North American Review and others. She has two poetry collections published at CavanKerry Press: The Fork Without Hunger (2005), and Without Wings (2009). She was the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and was selected by Donald Hall as a Witter Bynner Fellow in 2007. She currently holds the Amy Ryan Endowed professorship at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington, and is poetry editor for the literary journal Rock & Sling. She lives with my husband Bill Siems, and their two Dachshund Chihuahua dogs, Willow and Johnny.

Laurie Lamon is an exquisite writer of lyrics…her antecedents begin with Emily Dickinson. She’s a great poet of inwardness… Her work is delicate and pure, modern in manner, but written in her own voice.
— Donald Hall

I admire these poems – how they enact the lyrical equivalent of being in two places at one time. Lamon is drawn to edges, to that precise moment of transformation, and then, the moment after—the astonishing clarities of distinction. She does the near impossible—evoke a world at once continuous and still.
— Michele Glazer

Laurie Lamon’s poems are an absolute distinct experience. Their passionate precision and deep imagistic resonance, their crisp formal invention and tact take you to an utterly strange and refreshing window of rain and sunstruck stones and invite you to breathe, and to look. Without Wings is a gift and a true achievement.
— Christopher Howell

April 2009
84 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-12-9