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The Moons of August
Winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. This stunning debut collection explores family culture, motherhood, and memory.
- GenresPoetry
76 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 18, 2017
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking, Yes, this is a solid book of narrative poems.
But it almost seemed too smooth, too polished (too quiet?) at times, especially in the beginning sections of the book. Fortunately, there are enough moments when one of Laméris' poems just punches me in the gut, hollows out my heart that I feel justified in deeming this a four-star work. "Time" is just one of those poems that left me aching:
TIME
My nephew still wears a trace
of his baby smell.
When I pull his gangly body
towards me, inhale the scent
wafting from his crown
there's just the slightest whiff.
"I know," he says when I mention it,
twisting back and forth in my arms.
Only last year he stopped lisping his s's.
Sometimes in front of his friends
he pretends not to know us.
Love's a record keeper:
baby teeth, first wisps of hair,
growth marks inked on the wall.
We know we're going to lose everything.
But it almost seemed too smooth, too polished (too quiet?) at times, especially in the beginning sections of the book. Fortunately, there are enough moments when one of Laméris' poems just punches me in the gut, hollows out my heart that I feel justified in deeming this a four-star work. "Time" is just one of those poems that left me aching:
TIME
My nephew still wears a trace
of his baby smell.
When I pull his gangly body
towards me, inhale the scent
wafting from his crown
there's just the slightest whiff.
"I know," he says when I mention it,
twisting back and forth in my arms.
Only last year he stopped lisping his s's.
Sometimes in front of his friends
he pretends not to know us.
Love's a record keeper:
baby teeth, first wisps of hair,
growth marks inked on the wall.
We know we're going to lose everything.
September 12, 2023
One of my very favorite poets!
August 21, 2019
I’m used to consume “intense” poetry with one to three poems each day, but this collection only took me two sittings to finish - I just want to go on and on with her soft voice and tender sensitivity to our lives. It’s been a beautiful reading experience. Danusha Laméris has so much love to share, with the unborn, the lost newborn, the dead, the living. In particular, I love “What Trees Dream Of,” “Fictional Characters,” and “The Dead.” I love how she ties these embodiments into our immediate living experience in such a refreshing way.
I also appreciate the pieces about motherhood and birth. They intrigued me to read more female poets and poetry about female bodily experiences.
I also appreciate the pieces about motherhood and birth. They intrigued me to read more female poets and poetry about female bodily experiences.
March 13, 2025
The Moons of August
Danusha Laméris is something of a wildcard and a vivid talent. Her Bonfire Opera collection is incredible.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And then, her most recent, Blade by Blade, for me, fell flat and I barely finished it. Now, having finished The Moons of August, I am feeling deeply enthralled. This debut collection, which won the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, is mysterious and holds that delicate tension where simplicity becomes transcendent. The best poetry finds a way to do that. And here we have it in spades. She is wonderful at sifting dualities through a mesh of unexpected parallels and then blowing them into the mist. At times, she blows deep behind said mist to sink in with a mouthful of jagged teeth, to show the blood, while not being sensational or fraught w/ misplaced irony. I have a serious case of the fizz over this volume!
In her poem, To Bless, I am abridging here, but it takes shape like this:
To bless once meant to draw blood
as with the tip of a blade,
blessing, the act of wounding.
And now it has come to mean
a cutting through what cannot be seen
the way a saint might pass her hand,
over the bent head of the supplicant.
Or how a mother begins to weep
as her newborn is handed to her for the first time.
Is ordinary goodness more than we can bear?
What a blessing it is to be alive, we say
knowing that life is so unlikely, so near impossible
that it is a blessing to be born at all,
to come into this world wailing,
covered in blood.
This volume is full of wonderful contrasts like this and from beginning to end there is a growing crescendo that creates wonder and anticipation. Great delivery!
My favorites, of many excellent choices, are The Perfumer, the Fly, and The Balance:
The Perfumer
I was 20 when my mother took me to see him.
He was French, silver-haired. He held my arm,
lifted it to his Aquiline nose, sniffed
the inside of my slender wrist,
then nodded, scrawled
a few things on a slip of parchment
in that Gallic hand: Rose Absolute, Ambergris.
I wish I could remember more. Then one-by-one,
picked up the bottles, decanted viscous honey
into a slim blue vial. I touched the mouth
of the vessel to my skin, inhaled.
I wore it that whole year, the sweet musk,
under a sweater on my way to class,
over the soft pulse in my neck
where men pressed their lips.
And when my friend‘s mother died,
I wore it to her funeral.
It carried me, a sort of cloud
I breathe, a balm of certainty.
Now, all that’s left, an absence, distilled,
fragrance of longing, that ache
we walk with all our lives.
Fly
It lands on the white page
right under the glare of my flashlight
and I’m startled, not by the idea of a fly
soiling the last section of Jack Gilbert‘s poem,
it’s furred legs obscuring the lines about the ancient
Sumerian tablets not being inventory, but poems or psalms.
It’s the beauty that surprises me, a kind of iridescence
I’d imagine reserved for Cleopatra’s jewels.
Though what gem glitters so? In the alphabet
of veridity I can name, emerald, malachite
serpentine, jade. But this is green fused with gold
the way Thai silk glimmers in two different shades,
depending on how you hold it to the light,
or the dipped-in liquid-color
painted inside an abalone shell.
Peacocks know this hue, luminosity reflected
off their satin tail feathers.
I wish I could be a fly on the wall, we say.
I have swatted flies, shooed them out the window,
Brushed them from my arms in the heat of summer.
But this one rustles it’s filigreed wings, shifts its body,
now covering the words, “ingots,” and “copper”
and for a moment I see it—held aloft
by the bezel of language—looking back at me
through its big, glossy black eye.
The Balance
She was at a friend‘s apartment,
my mother, a third floor walk-up.
It was Summer. Why she slipped
into the back room, she can’t recall.
Was there something she wanted
from her purse… Lipstick?
A phone number?
Fumbling through the pile
on the bed, she looked up and saw—
was this possible—outside,
on the thin concrete ledge
a child, a girl, no more than two or three.
She was crouched down
eyeing an object with great interest.
A pebble, or a bright coin.
What happened next
must have happened very slowly.
My mother, who was young,
then leaned out the window, smiled.
Would you like to see
what’s in my purse? She asked.
Below, traffic rushed
down the wide street, horns blaring.
Students ambled home
under the weight of their backpacks.
From the next room,
strains of laughter.
The child smiled back, toddled along
the ledge. What do we know
of fate or chance, the threads
that hold us in the balance?
My mother did not imagine
one day she would
lose her own son, helpless
to stop the bullet
he aimed at his heart.
She reached out to the girl,
grabbed her in both arms,
held her to her chest.
Danusha Laméris is something of a wildcard and a vivid talent. Her Bonfire Opera collection is incredible.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And then, her most recent, Blade by Blade, for me, fell flat and I barely finished it. Now, having finished The Moons of August, I am feeling deeply enthralled. This debut collection, which won the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, is mysterious and holds that delicate tension where simplicity becomes transcendent. The best poetry finds a way to do that. And here we have it in spades. She is wonderful at sifting dualities through a mesh of unexpected parallels and then blowing them into the mist. At times, she blows deep behind said mist to sink in with a mouthful of jagged teeth, to show the blood, while not being sensational or fraught w/ misplaced irony. I have a serious case of the fizz over this volume!
In her poem, To Bless, I am abridging here, but it takes shape like this:
To bless once meant to draw blood
as with the tip of a blade,
blessing, the act of wounding.
And now it has come to mean
a cutting through what cannot be seen
the way a saint might pass her hand,
over the bent head of the supplicant.
Or how a mother begins to weep
as her newborn is handed to her for the first time.
Is ordinary goodness more than we can bear?
What a blessing it is to be alive, we say
knowing that life is so unlikely, so near impossible
that it is a blessing to be born at all,
to come into this world wailing,
covered in blood.
This volume is full of wonderful contrasts like this and from beginning to end there is a growing crescendo that creates wonder and anticipation. Great delivery!
My favorites, of many excellent choices, are The Perfumer, the Fly, and The Balance:
The Perfumer
I was 20 when my mother took me to see him.
He was French, silver-haired. He held my arm,
lifted it to his Aquiline nose, sniffed
the inside of my slender wrist,
then nodded, scrawled
a few things on a slip of parchment
in that Gallic hand: Rose Absolute, Ambergris.
I wish I could remember more. Then one-by-one,
picked up the bottles, decanted viscous honey
into a slim blue vial. I touched the mouth
of the vessel to my skin, inhaled.
I wore it that whole year, the sweet musk,
under a sweater on my way to class,
over the soft pulse in my neck
where men pressed their lips.
And when my friend‘s mother died,
I wore it to her funeral.
It carried me, a sort of cloud
I breathe, a balm of certainty.
Now, all that’s left, an absence, distilled,
fragrance of longing, that ache
we walk with all our lives.
Fly
It lands on the white page
right under the glare of my flashlight
and I’m startled, not by the idea of a fly
soiling the last section of Jack Gilbert‘s poem,
it’s furred legs obscuring the lines about the ancient
Sumerian tablets not being inventory, but poems or psalms.
It’s the beauty that surprises me, a kind of iridescence
I’d imagine reserved for Cleopatra’s jewels.
Though what gem glitters so? In the alphabet
of veridity I can name, emerald, malachite
serpentine, jade. But this is green fused with gold
the way Thai silk glimmers in two different shades,
depending on how you hold it to the light,
or the dipped-in liquid-color
painted inside an abalone shell.
Peacocks know this hue, luminosity reflected
off their satin tail feathers.
I wish I could be a fly on the wall, we say.
I have swatted flies, shooed them out the window,
Brushed them from my arms in the heat of summer.
But this one rustles it’s filigreed wings, shifts its body,
now covering the words, “ingots,” and “copper”
and for a moment I see it—held aloft
by the bezel of language—looking back at me
through its big, glossy black eye.
The Balance
She was at a friend‘s apartment,
my mother, a third floor walk-up.
It was Summer. Why she slipped
into the back room, she can’t recall.
Was there something she wanted
from her purse… Lipstick?
A phone number?
Fumbling through the pile
on the bed, she looked up and saw—
was this possible—outside,
on the thin concrete ledge
a child, a girl, no more than two or three.
She was crouched down
eyeing an object with great interest.
A pebble, or a bright coin.
What happened next
must have happened very slowly.
My mother, who was young,
then leaned out the window, smiled.
Would you like to see
what’s in my purse? She asked.
Below, traffic rushed
down the wide street, horns blaring.
Students ambled home
under the weight of their backpacks.
From the next room,
strains of laughter.
The child smiled back, toddled along
the ledge. What do we know
of fate or chance, the threads
that hold us in the balance?
My mother did not imagine
one day she would
lose her own son, helpless
to stop the bullet
he aimed at his heart.
She reached out to the girl,
grabbed her in both arms,
held her to her chest.
June 6, 2024
I ordered this chapbook after reading one of Lameris's poems, "Incha'Allah." The collection as a whole did not disappoint.
We each hope for a good life, for the blessings of healthy children, safe loved ones, a future. Some sadness because no one escapes tragedy, deaths of loved ones, disappointment. It’s only how we trudge along in faith and trust in the good times.
Dorianne Laux calls out "language clear as water and rich as blood." Naomi Shihab Nye, who chose this collection for the Autumn House Poetry Prize, writes: "Damusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power—in perfectly weighted lines and scenes. Here is the tragedy of loss and grief, and the gorgeous and fearless determination to find glory in survival."
I met Naomi Nye at The Flight of the Mind, many years ago now. I woke at 5:30am every morning I slept away from home in those days. (I was writing fiction that summer with Charlotte Watson Sherman.) I warned the other women who shared my room on the McKenzie River, "I wake early but I will carry myself out of the room as silently as I can." They sucked a breath. But then the other women were all in Naomi's class and at their first meeting she told them how she rose before her chickens to write poems. That evening they looked to me, "How early did you say you woke? Will you waken us?"
I don't know when it slipped into my speech
that soft word meaning "if God wills it."
Incha'Allah I will see you next summer.
The baby will come in spring, Incha'Allah.
Incha'Allah this year we will have enough rain.
We each hope for a good life, for the blessings of healthy children, safe loved ones, a future. Some sadness because no one escapes tragedy, deaths of loved ones, disappointment. It’s only how we trudge along in faith and trust in the good times.
Dorianne Laux calls out "language clear as water and rich as blood." Naomi Shihab Nye, who chose this collection for the Autumn House Poetry Prize, writes: "Damusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power—in perfectly weighted lines and scenes. Here is the tragedy of loss and grief, and the gorgeous and fearless determination to find glory in survival."
I met Naomi Nye at The Flight of the Mind, many years ago now. I woke at 5:30am every morning I slept away from home in those days. (I was writing fiction that summer with Charlotte Watson Sherman.) I warned the other women who shared my room on the McKenzie River, "I wake early but I will carry myself out of the room as silently as I can." They sucked a breath. But then the other women were all in Naomi's class and at their first meeting she told them how she rose before her chickens to write poems. That evening they looked to me, "How early did you say you woke? Will you waken us?"
Read
August 20, 2021Danusha Laméris’s debut collection, The Moons of August (Autumn House Press, 2014) is admirable not only for each poem’s strength, and Laméris’s command of powerful, concise language, but because the collection as a whole is filled with elegiac verse that feels like a recursive love song dedicated to all the people the speaker of the poems has lost. This, in and of itself, makes for quite a cohesive book, but Laméris also effectively uses common every day situations to illuminate much bigger topics, and skillfully runs a number of additional golden threads (of repeated symbols and metaphors) through her poems that result in them singing back and forth to each other as the reader moves along page to page.
January 13, 2021
Wow. Her poetry is stunning, leaving me at a bit of a loss for words. Absolutely gorgeous writing in this first book, delving into several big griefs that I cannot even imagine. Despite the heartbreaking subject matter in so many of these poems, this collection is never hard to read. It is simply achingly beautiful.
December 17, 2021
Beautiful writing. Sometimes you can see the clear influence of folks like Sharon Olds, Billy Collins, Diane Lockwood, and her mentor, Tony Hoagland. All good influences, and she puts her own twist on this style.
March 31, 2025
This is poetry that sometimes sneaks up on you, offering connections and insights you weren’t expecting. Lameris writes with quiet power about loss and grief, the many ways life surprises us, and the beauty there is to be found when we take the time to look.
August 9, 2019
Exquisite short free-verse poems about time and loss. Moving, often sad, but sweet.
February 25, 2020
A Christmas gift of poems by a woman who has had too many close family members die young and writes about that and what trees dream of and buying cherries amongst a number of other topics...
November 3, 2021
“Eve, After” is a top ten favourite poem for me. I also liked “The Dead” but tbh no other standouts this read through. Three stars anyway bc it’s Danusha Lameris and I love her
November 7, 2021
… What's gone
is not quite gone, but lingers.
Not the language, but the bones
of the language. Not the beloved,
but the dark bed the beloved makes
inside our bodies.
is not quite gone, but lingers.
Not the language, but the bones
of the language. Not the beloved,
but the dark bed the beloved makes
inside our bodies.
January 7, 2017
I love this book of poems by Danusha. I met Danusha last March at a women's writing conference. She was one of the featured writers and she read her poems with such grace, playfulness, and clarity. Really inspirational. I also had the chance to take a poetry workshop with her in October last year and it was an insightful experience, getting to think of writing as alchemy.
Her poems here ask questions, answer questions, introduce you to new sensations and observations that you may have overlooked in the past, share small moments and quiet thoughts, with a backdrop of loss and grief in most. Though even through the loss and grief, there is light and gratitude.
One of my favorite poems is "To Bless" and the verse within it:
"Lovers have the name of the beloved
pierced into their flesh, their pleasure so unbearable
only the point of a needle can say
what ecstasy they suffer."
Her poems here ask questions, answer questions, introduce you to new sensations and observations that you may have overlooked in the past, share small moments and quiet thoughts, with a backdrop of loss and grief in most. Though even through the loss and grief, there is light and gratitude.
One of my favorite poems is "To Bless" and the verse within it:
"Lovers have the name of the beloved
pierced into their flesh, their pleasure so unbearable
only the point of a needle can say
what ecstasy they suffer."
March 26, 2014
I am biased, having read the poems of this book throughout the years. Having said that, these poems weave a tapestry that encompasses all the colors. I often read poetry books that maintain the same tone, making it hard for me to gather the motivation to read them as a whole. Not this book. The Moons of August are accessible poems that draw me in and keep me reading, hauntingly, lovingly, and humorously taking me through "all the twists and turns" of grief and love. Journeying through childhood, adolescence, motherhood and marriage, the poems manage to transcend the personal and convey universal wisdom.
February 9, 2014
Lameris's first book is filled with narrative-lyric poems filled with family anecdotes, strong imagery, and good lines, but I fear, sometimes, the subject matter is more important than prosody.
April 21, 2021
A favorite book by a favorite poet. Warm and lively.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews