Steal Away: Selected and New Poems [Hardcover]

Raised in remote Arkansas, Wright fell in when quite young with the charismatic and legendary poet Frank Stanford, whose neosurrealist techniques and sudden death inform her earliest work, included in this seventh full-length book, her first selected. Soon, however, Wright had many other forms and models from Adrienne Rich to Edmond Jabes, from philosophical investigations to yearbook signatures and personal ads. Together and separately, these techniques produced the striking power and variety of String Light (1991), which declared Wright "the poet/ of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch/ phone books," "of yard eggs and/ sharpening shops" and of sex and female physicality, for whom "the body would open its legs like a book." Tremble (1996) confirmed these strengths and added a durable visionary dimension: "As surely as there are crumbs on the lips/ of the blind," one poem began, "I came for a reason." This collection draws liberally on those volumes, as well as the book-length Southern travelogue-cum-prose-poem Deepstep Come Shining (1998), and adds new sets of short poems. Some derive from Mexican retablos (folk-art altarpieces), which they imagine in strenuous, broken-up lines; a final series considers, and sometimes addresses, the incarcerated: "I too love. Faces. Hands. The circumference/ Of the oaks. I confess. To nothing/ You could use. In a court of law." Multicultural (with a Southern orientation) and experimental, challenging and immediately appealing, Wright has a core of fans but could have many more: this book's careful selection from a strong body of work should ensure that they find her.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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 nonsyntactical 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. Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.