Franz Wright Selected Works

Wright's first collection.

In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love—both divine and human—and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company. Whether he is writing about his regret for the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander ("I can just hear them on the telephone and keening all their kissy little knives"), or composing an ironic ode to himself ("To a Blossoming Nut Case"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.

Limited edition of 250 numbered copies.

A collection of 21 poems that rip through the world-weary, grieving daily life of a poet and a man. Reflecting Homer's Odyssey, Franz Wright reports with the language of poetry the story of his life, the relationship to his father, to his wife and the world inside and outside of him. With delicacy he interns himself in those worlds, sometimes overwhelmed by nostalgia and sometimes illuminated with an underglow of joy, as in "Elizabeth's Eyes," or quiet happiness, as in "The Catfish." As a wise Telemachus he walks, reflects and expresses a sovereign balance of mind in "unseen supervision," "between time of ingestion and time of departure: undisturbed, unafraid, as all things are passing—the unknown bird spoke: who will remember? And why should I care? I had my time. I got to be here."

Marick Press is happy to be publisher of Franz Wright's very first book of prose, some of it narrative, some of it dramatic, some of it highly lyrical, and much of it verging on the unclassifiable. This chapbook of seven of his prose pieces presages the publication by Knopf of Kindertotenwald, his collection of sixty-five prose pieces, in October of 2011. Those familiar with Wright's work will find many of the preoccupations and obsessions of his lyric poems present in his prose, but presented in a looser, more improvisatory and experimental form.

A collection published in 1980 by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.

A 1981 collection.

“Wright’s combining of physical and spiritual, communal and solitary, past and present, life and death, provides a powerful distillation of this poet’s troubling and encompassing vision. What we finally take away from Franz Wright’s poems is not a sense of his personal concerns or preoccupations so much as a melancholy and oddly solacing knowledge of the risks and mysteries that go with being human, having memories, experiencing isolation even among friend and family, and loving the world despite its indifference to us.” —David Young

The haunting collection of poems gathers the first four books of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where “fans old and new will find a feast amid famine” (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet’s gift was from the start.

"Throughout the several years that I've been following this still very young poet's work, I have been continuously impressed with one thing: that here was a passionate and original voice laying down poems of absolute necessity. First books are supposed, at best, to show promise. Franz Wright's The One Whose Eyes Open When You Close Your Eyes shows promise and more: the beginnings of brilliance. Just as the poems in this book needed to be written, they need to be read." —Thomas Lux

Wright's rare 1982 collection was originally printed in 1000 copies (400 hardcover, 600 soft).