The Fork Without Hunger

Foreword by Donald Hall

The Witter Bryner Foundation Fellowship 2007
The Independent Publisher Book Award Honorable Mention 2006
Arlin G. Meyer Prize Finalist 2005

In sharply-limned lyrics that are at once elegiac and celebratory, Laurie Lamon explores the inseparable union of pain and happiness that life invariably brings. Bending form with keen originality, this acclaimed poet is both traditionalist and innovator, a writer, says Ploughshare poetry editor David Daniel, “with rare precision and intelligence—and, rarer still, with genuine imagination.”

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.

Praise

I heard the dogs before
I opened the door late, after work—
first Maude who was dancing
in praise of my arrival for all she knew
it was: presence without end,
the end of waiting, the end
of boredom—
and then Li Po,
who, in the middle of his life,
learning to make his feelings known
as one who has carried breath
and heart close to the earth seven
times seven years, in praise
of silence and loneliness, climbed
howling, howling from his bed.

The Fork Without Hunger is a book that takes continual joy in the natural world. Yet throughout these luxuriant lyrics physical pain runs like an underground river. Pain is unpunctuated; a constant presence, a motion under the earth’s surface—but that surface is cherished. As ever, poetry happens, or reaches its uttermost, in the human collisions of contrary feeling. Torment twists in an oscillation of opposing currents—celebrations of flowers and dogs, of love and loss . . . Page after page, line after line, Lamon’s language retains its purity, its chastity, its precisions . . . Her poems are rare in their perfection of epithet, their delicacy of design, their cadence of attack . . .
— Donald Hall

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 in light.” Here is an enormously mature and expressive book, which I don’t recommend for unfeeling readers.
— Peter Davison, 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, seems near some mysterious and beautiful eruption . . .
— David Daniel, Ploughshares

July 2005
49 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9723045-5-9