Cooling Time
An American Poetry Vigil
An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing regularly from the peculiarities and backwaters of the American idiom. The book's title derives from a line of legal defense, unique to Texas courts: if a person kills someone before having had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult, he is not guilty of muder. Ever focused on possibilities, C.D. Wright demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives." Filled with humor, eroticism and an hypnotic fascination with language, Cooling Time is a prickly love-letter to the life of poetry. As she writes:
"Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do."
ISBN: 1-55659-216-7
An American Poetry Vigil
$15.00
Read Selected Poems
Excerpt from "By Jude McCramack Goddamnit to Hell's Dog Foot,"