Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

By C.D. Wright

Book Overview

C.D. Wright is a fearless poet long admired for her authentically erotic verse. With a Southern accent and cinematic eye she couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy, bundling fragments of stories to create poems that are, as she describes them, "succinct novels." Wright's poems are simultaneously modern and deeply primal; they are pheromonal.

Gathering work from her eight previous volumes, Steal Away weaves new work with Wright's best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes.

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.
--from "Our Dust"

"Wright shrinks back from nothing."--Voice Literary Supplement

"Wright is one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets."--Publishers Weekly

"C.D. Wright's best new poems are defiant, erotic, and disjunctive, easy to be moved by, hard to assemble, and like nothing else being made today."--Boston Phoenix

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published nine collections of poetry, served as State Poet of Rhode Island, and earned many awards, including a Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and is presently at work on a poetry-and-photographic documentary of Louisiana prisoners.

Also Available by C.D. Wright
Deepstep Come Shining
TP $14.00, 1-55659-092-X - CUSA
TC $22.00, 1-55659-093-8 - CUSA

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591721
• ISBN13: 9781556591723
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.4" x 9.9"

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.