Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

By C.D. Wright

Book Overview

Steal Away: Selected and New Poems presents C.D. Wright's best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes, along with new excerpts from her collaborative retablos series and from her newest work-a bracing vigil on prisoners and their incarceration.

Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright-with her Southern accent and cinematic eye-couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy. The resulting poems are hypnotic documentaries that, in her own words, "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591942
• ISBN13: 9781556591945
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.9" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A Banquet

If you're looking for a book to hang out with for the whole summer Steal Away is the one. It presents a range of Wright's work, from her early lyrics to impassioned formal experimentation. Wright stands at the place where rivers meet in contemporary poetry. She is both bighearted and fierce. I would dare say she is the one holding the light.

One of the finest

Wright's work is unceasingly fresh and visionary. I never tire of reading her work. She is truly one of the best poets pushing a pen in America. Keep on!

An excellent overview of an important, challenging poet

When I first read this book, I was not familiar with Wright's work. The eroticism of her works are sandwiched and juxtaposted by a syntax that pushes language and body out into an open space. The "Girlfriend" poems are particular telling of this mixing and distorting of syntax of English and the syntax of the body. Admittedly, this book is not for everyone; but poetry never is. If you enjoy sensual poets like Diane Di Prima or intensely intellectual poets like John Ashberry, Bin Ranke, and Wallace Stevens: Wright's words will surely speak to you. There is a diversity of culture and of technique, but a unity of vision that any poet can benefit from. I can only wish more poets were like her.