C.D. Wright's work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Long admired for the honed ferocity of her vision, she wrote with a distinctive Southern accent and a cinematic eye, cut with a secular wit that only slightly tempers her exigency. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that offer what she called 'a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning'. Bloodaxe published her first UK retrospective Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems in 2007. In One with Others, Wright returned to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, she interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories - especially those of her incandescent mentor, V (Mrs Vittitow) - with the voices of witnesses, neighbours, police, activists and a group of black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This is a history told by many voices, and it leaps howling off the page. Both a book-length poem and a probing work of investigative journalism, One with Others won the National Book Circle Critics Award.
C.D. Wright's work is enormously varied: she was an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvented herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Long admired for the honed ferocity of her vision, she wrote with a distinctive Southern accent and a cinematic eye, cut with a secular wit that only slightly tempers her exigency. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that offer what she called 'a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning'. Bloodaxe published her first UK retrospective Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems in 2007. In One with Others, Wright returned to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, she interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories - especially those of her incandescent mentor, V (Mrs Vittitow) - with the voices of witnesses, neighbours, police, activists and a group of black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This is a history told by many voices, and it leaps howling off the page. Both a book-length poem and a probing work of investigative journalism, One with Others won the National Book Circle Critics Award.
C.D. Wright (1949-2016) published many books of poetry and prose, including two book-length poems, Deepstep Come Shining (1998) and Just Whistle (1993); Cooling Time (2005), a book comprised of poetry, memoir and essay; and One with Others (Copper Canyon Press, USA, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2013), both a book-length poem and a work of investigative journalism. Her first UK retrospective, Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2007), was expanded from Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003), including a substantial number of the poems from her Griffin International Prize-winning collection Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). Her book of 'prosimetrical essays', The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, was published by Copper Canyon a few days before her totally unexpected death in January 2016. Her many honours included a Lannan Literary Award, a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship and the $50,000 2009 Griffin International Poetry Prize for Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008). She was a professor of English at Brown University, and edited Lost Roads Publishers for 30 years with her husband, poet Forrest Gander. She collaborated on many projects with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003/2007). She was State Poet of Rhode Island from 1995 to 1999.
'One with Others represents Wright's most audacious experiment yet in loading up lyric with evidentiary fact. An affecting element of this book is the way its elegiac impulses accord with, even as they chafe against, the documentary impulses' - Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker. 'Through juxtaposition and repetition, [Wright] weaves a compelling, disturbing, and often beautiful tapestry that at once questions the ability of language to get at the complicated truth of history ('because the warp is everywhere'), and underscores the ethical imperative to try. As Wright learns from V, "To act, just to act. That was the glorious thing".' - Publishers Weekly. 'Wright's sharply fractured, polyphonic, and suspenseful book-length poem is both a searing dissection of hate crimes and their malignant legacy and a lyric, droll, and fiery elegy to a woman of radiant resistance' - Booklist.
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