Product Description

C.D. Wright is one of America's leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, "C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature."

Rising, Falling, Hovering is a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. "We are running on Aztec time," she writes, "fifth and final cycle."

In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright's language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the corpses
in the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.
Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.
Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, the
evangelicals. . .

C.D. Wright, author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, is a professor of English at Brown University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #702464 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 100 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781556592737
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In her first collection of new lyric poems since 2003, Wright braids some of her most personal and intimate poetry to date with an extended meditation on the consequences of America's contemporary stance toward other countries. Short, elliptical lyrics, featuring Wright's trademark repetition of lines and sharp wit, which interrogate their own speaker and a companion (She is not really hearing what he's really saying) flank the two-part title piece, a long poem that is a travelogue of a trip to Mexico at the beginning of the current war in Iraq. Everywhere the shell-shocked speaker goes, she finds people mesmerized// by the new media-borne war, while she feels Ashamed of her solace in being here because, now more than ever, to be ashamed is to be American. As the lines blur between tourism and empire, and as images and impressions accrue (Whole new breed of dog born in every warren), the poem's speaker also reflects on the safety and precariousness of her own family. This book displays a new level of social and personal consciousness for Wright (One Big Self), who characterizes the powerful ambivalence that now accompanies life in America, where injustice may be the price of freedom, and where poetry/ doesn't/ protect/ you/ anymore. (Apr.)
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About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

At its very best
When poetry is at its very best it is a form of communication that compels a response from its audience. That response can arise from anywhere on the spectrum of human emotion and psychology. Such is the case with the seminal verse of C. D. Wright as compiled within the pages of "Rising, Falling, Hovering" from Copper Canyon Press. An award winning poet with twelve previously published volumes of her work, this latest and enthusiastically recommended collection is infused throughout with wit, honesty, emotional intensity, as it touches upon such diverse issues as technology, capitalism existential crisis, and candid observation of the human condition. 'Like Something Christenberry Pictured': ...stepping out of the story/ (ineluctably over, fellow travelers)/here just long enough to testify/to a blinding intensity/under that big dry socket of god/the camera mounted to capture/ordinary traffic violations/fixes instead on your final face/a single frame of unadulterated/urgency is what you see, urgency it is'.

The Best Yet
C.D. Wright continues to redefine the limits of poetry as the genre struggles to rediscover itself. Her experiments with form are refreshing as ever and her politics are layered in so organically that they will not, in ten years, stand out as merely "topical" references, but be the news that stays news. She is the only person I know who is really doing this work right now. In spite of her startling and discomfiting innovations, she is flesh and soul, full of grief and tenderness, always connected to a larger vision than that which is usually revealed in typically monological poetry. She is writing poetry in a time that she describes as "...no time for poetry" and yet she finds the poem, time after time, against hope.

cd wright "rising, falling.."
compelling, innovative and current in its scope

cd wright is a powerful poet