A booklength poem.

In her tenth book, this critically acclaimed poet offers haunting, elegant poetry which merges the mysteries of formal and linguistic experiment with traditional narrative. Whether read as individual poems, or as a larger suite, Deepstep Come Shining is a sensuous, Southern Gothic road trip filled with vernacular speech and startling imagery.

C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected memoir-poem-essay about contemporary American poetry. Ever focused on possibilities, Wright demonstrates that “the search for models becomes a search for alternatives,” and thereby defines the terms by which poets can chart their own course.

"These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother’s folding money, the poet’s anus, the black holes in his heart—where his life went out of him. Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do. Poetry is like food remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain Oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don’t want in my mouth relatively short."

"The first person is the narrator who appears throughout, guiding the reader with one hand while throwing sand in his eyes with the other, since all of this is full of contrivances and connivances and interpolations designed to show that what one invents or experiences is perhaps the same thing. Author Wright is an English professor and so is timid Ralph Hathorne Burr who may or may not be the narrator after he becomes the 'protagonist of a novel about murder.' In fact, hypothecating here, deviating there, one is left wondering about the murder itself—is it that of the old woman whom at first he stones, with fossils, in a wood—Burnet Woods of course—or a man who is killed at the same site or perhaps even his wife Cynthia, whom he permitted to die of her own hand? Other things do happen—he becomes involved with a young woman half his age who fulfills his 'sectsual needs' and then impels him to confess to a crime which of course she doesn't believe in—and he has an almost fatal heart attack—and, and, and, by the close you may find yourself lost in Burnet Woods with some of these mystifications." —Kirkus Reviews

Harry Field, an elderly professor looking after his baby granddaughter, allows Oliver, the child's absentee father, to take her to the park. Only too late do Harry and his daughter Judy realise that the child has fallen into the hands of the cult to which Oliver belongs - a group led by Miller, a dangerous man who claims to be God.

Wright's first novel, about the sexual problems afflicting an American marriage.

Peter Gregory, a 35-year-old high school English teacher with an ex-wife and kids, tries to drown himself in the Ohio River. Failing to manage even that, he decides to hitch a ride east, fleeing the state and escaping accusations of rape and murder. As he assumes and discards aliases along the way, he believes that he can begin again, a fresh start - but the past has a habit of catching up with all of us, no matter how fast we run.

Set in the American South in the years before and during the Civil War, John Wray’s hypnotic new novel is at once a crime story, a bravura work of historical fiction, and a fire-and-brimstone meditation on American credulity and corruption. Thaddeus Morelle’s followers call him “the Redeemer.” Over the years he has led the Island 37 Gang from stealing horses to stealing slaves in an enterprise so nefarious that both the Union and Confederacy have placed a bounty on their heads. But now Morelle is dead, murdered by his puppet and protégé, Virgil Ball, who may rid himself of the Redeemer but can never be free of his Trade. Based on the true story of John Murrell, a figure once as infamous as Jesse James, Canaan’s Tongue is suspenseful and fiercely comic, a modern masterpiece of the American grotesque.

Wolff's first novel.