Laméris, Danusha: Moons of August

Autumn House, paperback

Publication Date: January 01, 2014

Publisher Marketing: Winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye, Danusha Laméris's stunning debut collection explores family culture, motherhood, loss, and memory.

"This book of motherhood, memory, and elegiac urgency crosses borders, cultures, and languages to bring us the good news of being alive. With language clear as water and rich as blood, The Moons of August offers a human communion we can all believe in. Reckoning with and grieving for the past as they claim the future, these poems are wise, direct, and fearless. 'What's gone / is not quite gone, but lingers, ' Laméris reminds us. 'Not the language, but the bones / of the language. Not the beloved, / but the dark bed the beloved makes / inside our bodies.'" --Dorianne Laux, author of Only as the Day Is Long

"Danusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power in perfectly well-weighted lines and scenes. Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new finding, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift of distilling experience to find its shining core. Don't miss this stunning first book." --Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist