· C.D. Wright is one of the country’s “watched” poets · This is C.D.’s first book of prose—unruly and undeniably brilliant. · Title refers to a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. · A bit memoir, a bit poetics, a tad manifesto, and an ongoing argument with books. It is unlike anything out there. · As she writes: “To see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us—which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced.”
· paperback of successful cloth edition · Wright is a poet whose reputation continues to grow and grow (though we were shocked she was not nominated for a National Book Award) · Steal Away will be on the short list for the Griffin Prize (major literary prize from Canada)
• A MacArthur «Genius» Award winner• This new book is the companion volume to Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil • C.D. Wright is one of America’s most popular (and funkiest) poets, and one of the deeper thinkers about American poetry• C.D. Wright gets great attention for her work: National Book Award finalist; cover of Poets & Writers; starred reviews and Q&As in trade journals; featured on PBS NewsHour • Dave Eggers highlighted Wright's One Big Self in New York Times: «C. D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.»• C.D. Wright has a broad, passionate following
Rebellious and fiercely lyrical, the poems of C.D. Wright incorporate elements of disjunction and odd juxtaposition in their exploration of unfolding context. «In my book,» she writes, «poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.»C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has received numerous awards for her work, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. She teaches at Brown University in Rhode Island."Expertly elliptical phrasings, and an uncounterfeitable, generous feel for real people, bodies and places, have lately made Wright one of America's oddest, best and most appealing poets. Her tenth book consists of a single long poem whose sentences, segments and prose-blocks weave loosely around and about, and grow out of, a road trip through the rural South. Clipped twangs, lyrical ‘goblets of magnolialight,’ and recurrent, mysterious, semi-allegorical figures like ‘the snakeman’ and ‘the boneman’ share space with place names, lexicographies, exhortations and wacky graffiti (‘God is Louise’).… cherish Wright's latest ‘once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning.’"—Publishers Weekly"For me, C.D. Wright's poetry is river gold. 'Love whatever flows.' Her language is on the page half pulled out of earth and rivers—still holding onto the truth of the elements. I love her voice and pitch and the long snaky arms of her language that is willing to hold everything—human and angry and beautiful."—Michael Ondaatje"C.D. Wright is entirely her own poet, a true original."—The Gettysburg Review
an electrifying, idiosyncratic addition to the ever-growing library of Civil Rights Movement books C.D. Wright is using the tools and techniques of poetry to write a «people's history» of an ugly racist event in her beloved Arkansas The hero of this book is a woman named «V,» who became a life-long mentor to C.D. Wright C.D. Wright examines racist events in her native Arkansas and creates a layered, nuanced, and riveting tribute to a cantakerous and heroic white woman with the courage to become «one with others,» and then be driven to the state line and told to leave by troopers
“Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence.”—The New Yorker Inspired by numerous visits inside Louisiana state prisons—where MacArthur Fellow C.D. Wright served as a “factotum” for a portrait photographer—One Big Self bears witness to incarcerated men and women and speaks to the psychic toll of protracted time passed in constricted space. It is a riveting mosaic of distinct voices, epistolary pieces, elements from a moralistic board game, road signage, prison data, inmate correspondence, and “counts” of things—from baby’s teeth to chigger bites: Count your folding money Count the times you said you wouldn’t go back Count your debts Count the roaches when the light comes on Count your kids after the housefire One Big Self—originally published as a large-format limited edition that featured photographs and text—was selected by The New York Times and The Village Voice as a notable book of the year. This edition features the poem exclusively. C.D. Wright is the author of ten books of poetry, including several collaborations with photographer Deborah Luster. She is a professor at Brown University.