The Fork Without Hunger

Life teaches us that regret is born along with love, that disappointment is hope’s twin, that death starts with birth, and pain with pleasure. In The Fork Without Hunger, Laurie Lamon makes a music that persuades not only my mind but my senses to accept this duality from both sides at once, but still to believe that “the world could end with light.” Here is an enormously mature and expressive book, which I don’t recommend for unfeeling readers. — Peter Davison, poetry editor of The Atlantic Monthly With rare precision and intelligence—and, rarer still, with genuine imagination—Laurie Lamon navigates the subtly terrifying, elegiac waters of the poems in The Fork Without Hunger. In this very impressive debut, Lamon’s poems, with their quirky grace, seem near some mysterious and beautiful eruption: “Pain thinks of dropping money / into the view master waiting for whales to breach / Pain thinks of the solid world the vast disturbances.” One watches with great anticipation and pleasure. — David Daniel, poetry editor, Ploughshares, Emerson College