Jennifer Holley Lux’s first book of poems, White Portals, has arrived in the world wholly formed and beautiful. Water is its primary element: oceans and beaches and rivers. Even the language seems sensuously liquid: luscious alliterations, smooth rhythms, and swaying rhymes that intermix easily with free verse and prose. But White Portals isn’t simply pretty. Lux gives us stones along with watery kisses and shows us women whose hearts close, then open again. This is a wonderful arrival on our shores.

—Cathleen Calbert, author of The Afflicted Girls

In White Portals, Jennifer Holley Lux’s stunning debut collection, the reader crosses the threshold of the text to find unexpected answers to questions that provoke the startling images that haunt the psyche of the book—flooded rivers, shipwrecked sailors, dirt eaters, sand-men and sand-women—counterposed against more familial poems of delicacy and intensity. Lux makes metaphor of her world, gives it substance and gravity, and sometimes even macabre humor. An original new voice.

—Stuart Dischell, author of Children with Enemies

Through White Portals, Jennifer Holley Lux takes us into a vibrant world, a world full of love and yearning, but a world hiding a great shadow, the shadow that awaits us all.  With a heartfelt urgency, she allows us to share the experiences she has lived, and to see in them reflections of our own lives. There is in these poems much bravery, an honesty that does not close down the hard truths of our lives. This book marks the appearance of a bright new voice in American poetry.

—David Bottoms, former Poet Laureate of Georgia and author of We Almost Disappear