Steal Away

C.D. Wright

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.

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ISBN: 9781556591945

Format: Paperback

Lapse

After the last war we drafted pages and pages
of our final will and testimony. Then we set off
in a different direction. What we left behind
didn’t amount to much. I was all for living
the fictitious life. We chipped in to drive
until we ran out of gas. We wound up in one lost valley.
Cold cash passed through us like lightning through trees.
We nearly died laughing. We weren’t drunk.
Winter was mild, the spring came in torrents.
Under the duck cloth with handkerchiefs on our heads—
due to a hat shortage—there was talk of building
a spur back to the main highway. Our jokes
wore thin, our jeans. We printed a paper
by night, the single issue being peace.
Water oaks in the carlights looked like I don’t know what.
We slept fine. The cooking wasn’t bad.
The part I remember fondly—him,
sitting up in the seminaked sunshine,
                                                          his hair blowing all around.

About the Author

C.D. Wright (1949–2016), one of her generation’s most popular, formally restless, and influential poets, was recognized with scores of major awards including fellowships from the MacArthur, the Lila Wallace, the Lannan, and the Guggenheim foundations. She received a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts which, after her death, honored her by launching a new award in her name. Wright was raised in the Ozarks and came to live with Forrest Gander in San Francisco, Eureka Springs, Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico, …

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Reviews

“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.” —New Yorker

“It’s a boon to have such a wealth of her crackling, intelligent, erotic, ‘painfully beautiful,’ keep-you-on-your-toes poems in one place. New works accompany selections from nine previous, mostly out of print collections, and all are electrifying in their clear-eyed reports on desire, determination, and survival. For all the darkness she plumbs, Wright reminds readers, ‘The world spins / nightly toward its brightness and we are on it.'” —Booklist

“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 work should ensure that they find her.” —Publishers Weekly

“In her tenth volume, Wright proves herself to be one of the most complex, fascinating and ultimately rewarding American poets writing today… not only do her poems explore uncharted ground in both subject and form, each new volume seems to take new risks… Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“Steal Away gives us a good ride down back roads with C.D. Wright.” —Ruminator Review

“… there’s reason to rejoice over Steal Away… It leaves you filled. It leaves you hungry.” —Poet Lore

“[Wright’s] linguistic curiosity and intellectual daring, bordering on brashness, continue to push her work into delightfully challenging terrain… It is her willingness to risk and wager, her recognition that the desire for perfection in the utterance must sometimes take a backseat to genuine discovery and surprise, that lends Wright’s work its enduring energy.” —Harvard Review