From Ploughshares

"Dorriane Laux's poems are sassy, pugnacious, and their voice is energized with whatever glory sustains life.... Constantly rewarding.., Awake is a book written with enormous precision and beauty.  It has such confidence in its authority, it overstates nothing.  Sculptured, economical, tough, possessing a vision informed by experience and compassion, this is an astonishingly mature first book, the wisest I have read in years."

—Philip Levine