An Enemy in Their Mouths by Dorie LaRue

Less divining rod than scalpel.  This wry, acerbic event of a collection does not even once flinch.  Over the course of thirty poems in 3 parts, LaRue attempts to make sense of the senselessness of pain but only succeeds in making great Art.  There are no easy answers here, no answers at all in fact but a mother’s desperate by-the-nails search and a scathing commentary on how humanity has turned its back on itself. Pain is the inquisitor in An Enemy In Their Mouths and, sadly, pain is the answer. When pondering addiction and asking the greater questions on death avoidance/worship masquerading as progress, LaRue does not spare herself but only offers up her experience, perhaps for her own closure and the benefit of redemption for the reader.  She succeeds in extending her care to us and finds for a place where her love will not fail.

–Jim Trainer, author of Love and Wages

Dorie LaRue‘s title alludes to a line from Othello: “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains.” In this searingly honest collection, the enemy is drugs, and the brains being stolen are those of our children. Much has been written about the drug epidemic, but only LaRue understands the all-consuming hunger that drives it: “the idea that being drugged/is better than being alive.” The ghost of Anne Sexton, who was also driven by such hungers, presides over these poems, as rich with imagery as hers.

–Julie Kane, Professor Emeritus, Northwestern State University, and Poet Laureate 2011-2013