PositiveWorld Literature Today... includes selections from [Laux\'s] five previous books of poetry and thirty-two pages of new poetry, some of her best to date. As with any collection of selected poems spanning twenty-nine years, we are able to see more clearly (by way of the close juxtaposition of poems separated by decades) constants and metamorphoses in poetic style and content ... Laux’s work from the beginning has excelled by way of voice and imagery: a distinct and consistent voice from book to book delights with imagery that is vibrant, original, and vivid. These qualities of imagery shine in every poem, but nowhere more so than in her portraits, especially of celebrities that all of us can picture, such as Mick Jagger and Cher ... Laux’s poetry, then, is decidedly written in the grain of her poetic era, not across that grain. As such, we can sometimes feel as if we’ve read these poems before in some way: their strategies often fall within a kind of group free-verse style that almost always feels vaguely familiar by way of strategy and movement, the kind of consensus style we might surmise frequently in the high-profile glossy magazines of our time ... In these ways, then, Laux’s poetry does not distinguish itself, except in those poems that rise above everything else she has written and astonish us with their achievement even within this received style. Such poems exist in this collection, enough to warrant a careful reading and maybe enough for her to emerge when all is done as one of the best in her group, the way a specific painter may have emerged as one of the best \'Impressionists\' ... What strikes me in reading these poems chronologically is how the power of this poet’s imagination and apprehension of the unseen deepens as we proceed through to the end.
