"The poems collected in The Fork Without Hunger reflect my belief that poems use language to point us toward the world that is often overlooked—the world of stillness, the world where points of vital connection tremble and come into being—the world of things as they are, without our prejudices, our rationalizations, and our verbal clutter. They address the subjects of pain and loss, separation, and survival, as well as the journeys and the motions of memory and time which can bring us into the presence of love and the mysteries of epiphany. The Pain Poems included in this collection are from an ongoing cycle of poems whose subjects include history, religion, suffering, and grace. Other central images are that of the garden and that of the double—the tension between self and other, temporal and eternal, familiar and extraordinary."

Laurie Lamon has lived in the Pacific Northwest and taught poetry workshops and literature seminars at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington since 1985 (where she is associate professor of English). She received her doctorate from the University of Utah and her M.F.A. from the University of Montana. Her areas of greatest interest in teaching include seminars in Poetry of Witness, Whitman and Dickinson, Women Writers, and poetry writing. Her poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Colorado Review, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Primavera, and Poetry Northwest. She is the recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust Award in 2005, a Graves Award in 2002, and a Pushcart Prize in 2001 for the poem “Pain Thinks of the Beautiful Table.” Her work is included in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and is forthcoming in the second Poetry Daily anthology. Twelve of the Pain Poems, an ongoing cycle of poems whose subjects include history, religion, loss, and survival, are included in her first collection of poems, The Fork Without Hunger, published by CavanKerry Press in 2005. She is at work on new poems, and compiling and editing what will be a collection of the Pain Poems. She lives with her husband William Siems and their two Scottish Terriers, Maude and Li Po.