C.D. Wright

For a long while now, C. D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty — it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical abomination. This book, while angry and sorrowful and bewildered, has humor, constant levity an...

This poem was written for the occasion of Ernie E. Wright’s 90th birthday and first published in DoubleTake. It is based on a taped interview with his son Warren. It is printed here in our father’s memory, and in honor of his friend Roy E. Danuser, now 92, and most likely at his desk at this hour, preparing a brief.

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, ceasel...