C.D. Wright Selected Works

The Essential C.D. Wright
Poems

Spanning four decades of writing—and including never-before-seen poems—The Essential C.D. Wright carries the reverence and wisecracking lyricism of poems that reshaped American poetry.
The Essential C.D. Wright gathers rare selections across the famed poet’s entire oeuvre—from the first book, Alla Breve Loving (1976), through to ShallCross, which was in production at the time of her unexpected death in 2016. Tracing a writing life that spans more than four decades, this essential collection illuminates works that remain empowered by an unrelenting independence, a reverence for mentors, and wry, wisecracking lyricism. With a moving introduction by Forrest Gander, this volume cements C.D. Wright’s place in the literary canon.

Casting Deep Shade
An Amble

A passionate, poetic exploration of humanity’s shared history with the beech tree. Before Wright’s unexpected death in 2016, she was deeply engaged in years of ambling research to better know this tree―she visited hundreds of beech trees, interviewed arborists, and delved into the etymology, folk lore, and American history of the species. Written in Wright’s singular prosimetric style, this “memoir with beech trees” demonstrates the power of words to conserve, preserve, and bare witness.

Honoring Wright’s lifelong fascination with books as objects, this final work is a three-panel hardcover that encloses the body of text, illustrated with striking color photographs of beech trees by artist Denny Moers.

ShallCross
Poems

In a turbulent world, C.D. Wright evokes a rebellious and dissonant ethos with characteristic genre-bending and expanding long-form poems. Accessing journalistic writing alongside filmic narratives, Wright ranges across seven poetic sequences, including a collaborative suite responding to photographic documentation of murder sites in New Orleans. ShallCross shows plain as day that C.D. Wright is our most thrilling and innovative poet.

The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All
Poems

A companion to her astonishing collection of prose Cooling Time, C.D. Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry.

Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues
Poems

“CD Wright’s is a poetry of  Southern mountain vision brought to the streets in a language of brilliant synaesthesia, colloquial warmth and laconic wit. These are unpredictable poems of jazz, dreams, domestic violence and ‘what is written on mirrors in Louisville.’ The territory is uniquely Wright’s, but borders that of James Agee and Diane Arbus: common, strange and filled with risk. Throughout these poems there is a saxophone playing and a poignant voice making sense.” —Carolyn Forché

“Images rise from these poems like startled birds flushed from the field. What we have is the courage of a writer with and against the sad voices, and that original language of a faith in faith. This is the fluent reverie, a long drug of feeling, taking us to places and things seen clearly and with grace.” —Norman Dubie

“The dramatic and emotional vitality of CD Wright’s language, the authenticity and daring of her tone and speech, make her poems, one after the other, surprising, outrageous, exciting, moving, funny. She incorporates naturally the bitterness, loneliness and humor of the world and tradition of the blues—passionate, disappointed, violent, awry. Her voice and her talent are genuine and unmistakable. They give heart.” —W. S. Merwin

Tremble
Poems

In this, her eighth collection of poems, C.D. Wright endeavors to penetrate the retina of fears that incessantly convene to blunt the vision required of us. While the poet sustains no delusions about achieving equilibrium outright, she nevertheless meticulously undertakes to construct an intimate, adamantine presence out of psychic peril. The vernacular architecture of Wright's poems continues to dispute the authorities, high and low, over means and measures of poetic production and presentation. With instruments no more exalted than "Just this water glass" and "this untunable spoon" she brings a bracing, idiosyncratic light into every frame. In Tremble, urban and rural sensibilities commingle in an ethical imagination to convoy the reader into unexpectedly moving experiences of perception. Throughout, as she says, "The left hand keeps it focused."

One With Others
[a little book of her days]

In this National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines explosive incidents grounded in the Civil Rights Movement. In her signature style, Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, interviews, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vittitow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, and activists. This history leaps howling off the page.