Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

by C. D. Wright

Overview

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 Universityand in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556591945
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	09/01/2003
Edition description:	2nd Revised ed.
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

C.D. Wright, a Professor of English at Brown University, is the author of eleven books of poetry, as well as several collaborative works with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. She has earned fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations, and is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in Rhode Island.

Read an Excerpt

What Keeps

We live on a hillside

close to water

We eat in darkness

We sleep in the coldest

part of the house

We love in silence

We keep our poetry

locked in a glass cabinet

Some nights We stay up

passing it back and

forth

between us

drinking deep

Editorial Reviews

In her tenth volume, Wright proves herself to be one of the most complex, fascinating and ultimately rewarding American poets writing today. Over a 20-year period, she chronicles her journey from a poor Deep South childhood (in an essay, she once compared Arkansas to South Africa) to respected New England professor, from "a girl on the stairs [who] listens to her father/ beat up her mother" (from her 1982 collection, Translating the Gospel Back into Tongues) to the strong and empowering "girl friend" poems new in this collection. Always distinguishing between I and Thou, she identifies with the victim without becoming victimized herself. Even in the sadomasochistic prose poems of Just Whistle (1993), the body takes on a distinct and defiant life of its own, an Other standing apart from the narrator. For her, it seems a natural step from Southern down-home dialect (at least as her writer's ear perceived it) to the experiments with non-syntactical language that put her in the forefront of experimental poetry. Not only do her poems explore uncharted ground in both subject and form, each new volume seems to take new risks. If this book has any pitfalls, it's that there's not enough space to include more poems from each volume. Highly recommended.
— Library Journal

Rochelle Ratner

Raised in remote Arkansas, Wright fell in when quite young with the charismatic and legendary poet Frank Stanford, whose neo-surrealist techniques - and sudden death - inform her earliest work, included in this seventh full-length book, her first selected. Soon, however, Wright had many other forms and models - from Adrienne Rich to Edmond Jabès, from philosophical investigations to yearbook signatures and personal ads. Together and separately, these techniques produced the striking power and variety of String Light (1991), which declared Wright "the poet/ of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch/ phone books," "of yard eggs and/ sharpening shops" and of sex and female physicality, for whom "the body would open its legs like a book." Tremble (1996) confirmed these strengths and added a durable visionary dimension: "As surely as there are crumbs on the lips/ of the blind," one poem began, "I came for a reason." This collection draws liberally on those volumes, as well as the book-length Southern travelogue-cum-prose-poem Deepstep Come Shining (1998), and adds new sets of short poems. Some derive from Mexican retablos (folk-art altarpieces), which they imagine in strenuous, broken-up lines; a final series considers, and sometimes addresses, the incarcerated: "I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference/ Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing/ You could use. In a court of law." Multicultural (with a Southern orientation) and experimental, challenging and immediately appealing, Wright has a core of fans but could have many more: this book's careful selection from a strong body of works should ensure that they find her.

Publishers Weekly

It sometimes seems misleading to call Wright a poet; as her latest volume of poems makes clear, she is a chronicler of the travails that take place "between midnight and Reno," deeply interested in the social realities of America's poor and restless and in "towns with quarter-inch / phone books." Her appetite for digging up what she calls "protected and private things" results in poems about everything from sexual longing to America's incarceration system, but they are always alive to simple physical pleasures, like a trip to a twenty-four-hour supermarket. 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 paradox that the body is the source of language, and yet language outlasts our bodies.

The New Yorker