Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

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

"Wright proves herself to be one of the most complex and fascinating poets writing today." -Library Journal

Library Journal - Rochelle Ratner

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.

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.