Synopses & Reviews
Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning."
from "Our Dust"
You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,
I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phone books, of failed
roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and
sharpening shops,
jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline
factory on the penitentiary road.
"Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."—The New Yorker
"Wright shrinks back from nothing."—Voice Literary Supplement
"C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire."—American Letters
C.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.
Synopsis
Poetry. Now in paperback, STEAL AWAY presents C.D. Wright's best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright-with her Southern accent and cinematic eye-couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning." "Wright proves herself to be one of the most complex and fascinating poets writing today"-Library Journal.
Synopsis
"Wright proves herself to be one of the most complex and fascinating poets writing today." -Library Journal
About the Author
C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently the booklength narrative poem Deepstep Come Shining(Copper Canyon, 1998) and Steal Away: Selected and New Poems(Copper Canyon, 2002), which was a finalist for The Griffin Poetry Prize. In 1994 she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post. Wrightâs awards include the Poetry Center Book Award, the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a General Electric Award for the literary essay, a Whiting, a Guggenheim, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Rhode Island Governorâs Award for the Arts. On a fellowship for writers from the Lila Wallace-Readerâs Digest Foundation, she curated âa walk-in book of Arkansas,âan exhibition which toured throughout her native state. She collaborated with photographer Deborah Luster are on One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, which won the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She edits Lost Road Publishers with her husband, the poet Forrest Gander.