Thomas Lux

Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux wrote cover features for the Reader from 1999 through 2009, whose subjects ranged from the Coronado bridge to a man who loves bugs. Lux, who was the Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three National Endowment Fellowships in Poetry as well as the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award.

Lux passed away in February 2017.

His photo is by Barnaby Hall.

Articles by Thomas Lux

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I Think You’re Wonderful

I think you’re wonderful. I’m driving my car and your name is on every mailbox. I’m kissing you and my shoes crawl away in darkness, sweet gadgets sing in my wrists, the life I dumped ...

"Criss Cross Apple Sauce"

— for Claudia Criss cross apple sauce do me a favor and get lost while you’re at it drop dead then come back without a head my daughter sings for me when I ask her ...

Zirk Ubu, a San Diego’s alternative circus troupe

Bless this crew of visionaries, joy-bringers, and nutcakes!

Before visiting San Diego's Zirk Ubu, the last time I'd gone to the circus, I'd walked out with 50 pounds of elephant dung in a cardboard box on my shoulder.

Tie Ilya Kaminsky up, make sure he stays at SDSU

From the land of poets

Odessa: it doesn’t sound like a particularly Russian word. Maybe Spanish, or Italian. Actually, it was named after Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s (if Homer existed) great epic poem, The Odyssey. Any word, when it ...

23 Reader writers describe the regime of editor Judith Moore

She hated adverbs

Busy Fingers Are Happy Fingers — Joe Deegan Mother Reader — Barbarella Build Your Writing Muscles — Ollie Let the Tape Recorder Do the Work — Matthew Lickona Faith — Abe Opincar Make Something Better ...

Too Many Passive Verbs

She cajoled me. She encouraged me. She got tough on my ass.

Judith Moore called me in the fall of 1995, when I was living temporarily in Laguna Beach and teaching at UC Irvine for a semester. Judith was familiar with my poems and deduced from some ...

Eric Von Sydow and Steve Piccus do double hypnosis

Stage shows vs. legitimate form of therapy

Some people believe God to be the first hypnotist: He put Adam to sleep and took out a rib to make Eve. It's a leap, but today hypnotism is used as an alternative to anesthesia ...

KWest Taxidermy's Kevin Moreau is San Diego's waterfowl specialist

Frozen drama

“I could love a duck!” the American poet Theodore Roethke wrote hyperbolically, manically, in one of an astonishing series of longish poems usually referred to as “The Lost Son” poems. I’ve always liked ducks myself ...

JunkBoy inhales condoms through his nose and pulls them out his mouth

And he's one of San Diego's fire-eaters

One thing I’ve learned: go looking for fire eaters and you don’t know what you’ll find. After putting out the word that I was looking for fire eaters (I have a few, um, unique friends ...

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