Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania

What I can't figure out about Gregory Lawless's new collection of poems, Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania, is how he did it. This is a book about family, about sorrow and love and joy and people and fun. It's a community book. A book about community. You open this book, to any poem, and are faced with this question: How do I put it down? Because you can feel and see yourself in the work. Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is hard to put down. Honestly, I don't know if this place exists in the real world but Lawless is such a tremendous poet that it's difficult to think that it doesn't. Actually, it doesn't matter. Somewhere in that space between a dream and not-a-dream is the place where these poems take root, "where the buses are powered / by the collective goodwill / of the people the litter / is beautiful most everyone recycles / and we think about death / only once in a great while." I couldn't put this book down. You won't be able to put it down either. --Matthew Lippman

Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania is a world both hilarious and heartbreaking, familiar and utterly new. Here, we meditate upon family, mortality, agency; we come to recognize the vivid and the absurd as harbingers of truth. Here, we are human, which is bewildering and beautiful; we would not trade places with the angels, "bored to death by everything / they understand." "I notice / all the birds and things not noticing me, // but I'm too half brokenhearted not / to notice them back," writes Lawless, and we are grateful that he notices and that he shares Dreamsburgh's terror and tenderness with us. --Dora Malech

Taciturn, hilarious, strange and true -- Gregory Lawless's poems are funny like Jack Handey and big-hearted like Denis Johnson. I'd trust no one else to take me to Dreamburgh and steer me through the traffic. --Jack Christian