Among Lux’s first collection, Sunday: Poems (1979) was grounded in the neo-surrealist tradition. Contemporary Poets contributor Richard Damashek wrote that Lux’s early work was “intensely personal … tormented and tortured, full of complex and disjointed images reflecting an insane and inhospitable world.” Such early Lux’s poems were often portraits of a “solo native…always strange to the world,” observed Elizabeth Macklin in Parnassus, “always on the verge of extradition, always beset with allergies to the native element, ‘like a simple vase not tolerating water.’”
