C.D. WRIGHT, POET

“No single description adequately captures Wright’s work; she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume.” —The MacArthur Fellows Program

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She is the author of a dozen books, including the book-length poems, Deepstep Come Shining and Just Whistle. In 1994 she was named State Poet of Rhode Island, a five-year post. She also authored two state literary maps. With photographer Deborah Luster, she published One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. The project won the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and their collaboration exhibited at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City, and the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. among others. On a fellowship for writers from the Wallace Foundation, she curated a “Walk-in Book of Arkansas,” an exhibition that toured throughout her native state for two years.

Her most recent titles are One Big Self: An Investigation (Copper Canyon, 2007), Like Something Flying Backwards, New and Selected (Bloodaxe Editions, 2007), Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon, 2005). Rising, Falling, Hovering will be out in 2008, also from Copper Canyon Press.

She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was given the Robert Creeley Award and elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She lives outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander. Their son’s name is Brecht.

ABOUT Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press)
C.D. Wright is one of America’s most compelling and idiosyncratic poets—an artist who has developed a unmistakable voice and penetrating vision. As Publishers Weekly noted in a starred review of her last book, “Wright gets better with each book, expanding the reach of her art; it seems it could take in anything.” Wright’s new book, Rising, Falling, Hovering, is an interweave of deeply personal and politically ferocious poems that write into the realities of our times—from illegal immigration and the specific consequences of Empire to the challenges of parenting and the honesty required of human-to-human relationship:

About the other night    I know you are sorry    I am sorry too    We were tired    Me
and my open-shut-case mouth    You and your clockwork disciplines    And I know it is too far to go   
But we can’t leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world

There is living and perception and power in these poems. The sopa de pollo, or chicken soup, that recurs thematically through the book in reference to crossing al otro lado, to the other side, is a code word for the undocumented immigrants who die crossing the border from Mexico to the United States. Wright’s fragmentary yet fluid narrative unites them to other grave crises propagated by the US (“us”) as colonial superpower through provocative and sparse narrations, but also to the bodily experiences of not-so political situations. The world propels towards an Aztec-calendar’s impending end, uniting the phenomenon of imperialism to centuries of colonial history. But the style of Wright’s unpredictable language arcs through the historical context to reach with broadened vision deeper into the personal—even to the point of suggesting:

Poetry
Doesn’t
Protect
You
Anymore

 “Verbal energy on my part is expended on packing words down. I am concerned with density, setting up a chain reaction using the least amount of verbal material.” — C. D. Wright