In the Works

Author: Doug Lang

Publisher: Edge Books (2023)

The delight of play and the play of light, atolls of wit and the wit of soul, the hilarity of the words and worlds of hilarity: Doug Lang’s saucy, irresistible impishness and explosive intelligence make his poetry as intoxicating as it is inimitable. In his fortune cookie poem Lang writes, “Your sense of humor is of no use to you” –– but it is to us. This is nude formalism avant la lettre. And then some. --Charles Bernstein

Doug Lang’s poems are the only poems that matter, the only poems to undo matter and matter’s semolina mango afore the great splatter — he has written the only sestinas I can stand, much less admire amidst the undead security guards & golfers lying dude fried. As the great Patrick Ewing told his boys once he made the NBA & played against Larry Bird for the first time, this motherfucker is the Truth! I can attest that Irish Americans know that change is bad — & in the future you will look at me and say, “No kidding?” All the diction, all the play, all the prosody, all the graphs of the mind moving and retooling, all the if you see someone, why not have doubts are here. This is a hell of a book, the soulful revolution of wild flying crab language beyond sex with microbes. Are you sure you deserve it? --Anselm Berrigan

The poems and prose in In the Works are like anticipated motion in sticky asphalt. They don’t describe an imagined future because they swirl in the language we’ve been speaking, hearing, recognizing all along. We are all in this book, a perpetual collaboration with the human, the other-than-human, the more-than-human in the long line of poetic indeterminacy. Maybe In the Works is all you need to read for a while — it’s bad out there but you can still engage it, offer it love, and never give up your weaving and ducking. “Who made me? Nobody made me.” --Diane Ward

Doug Lang’s work is mysterious, wise, ridiculous, funny.  His sonnets, for example, demonstrate his extraordinary ability to seemingly cram all of life and consciousness into the tiny, but near-bursting, confines of the form, with nothing ever seeming forced. So much goes on inside Doug Lang’s poems that they appear to capture and record the cacophony of the 21st-century’s tower-of-Babel soundtrack of life on earth.  He is as free and virtuosic with language as Pollock was with paint. His dazzling technical mastery enables him to inhale all the jargon-diction-blather-discourse in the atmosphere and breathe it back into the language of these poems to amazing effect. This book represents a significant contribution to contemporary literature. --Terence Winch