Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

By C.D. Wright

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591942
• ISBN13: 9781556591945
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 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.