Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

C.D. Wright is a fearless poet long admired for her authentically erotic verse. With a Southern accent and cinematic eye she couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy, bundling fragments of stories to create poems that are, as she describes them, “succinct novels.” Wright’s poems are simultaneously modern and deeply primal; they are pheromonal.

Gathering work from her eight previous volumes, Steal Away weaves new work with Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes.

You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,
I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phone books, of failed
roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and
sharpening shops,
jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline
factory on the penitentiary road.
—from “Our Dust”

“Wright shrinks back from nothing.”—Voice Literary Supplement

“Wright is one of America’s oddest, best, and most appealing poets.”—Publishers Weekly

“C.D. Wright’s best new poems are defiant, erotic, and disjunctive, easy to be moved by, hard to assemble, and like nothing else being made today.”—Boston Phoenix

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She has published nine collections of poetry, served as State Poet of Rhode Island, and earned many awards, including a Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and is presently at work on a poetry-and-photographic documentary of Louisiana prisoners.

Also Available by C.D. Wright
Deepstep Come Shining
TP $14.00, 1-55659-092-X • CUSA
TC $22.00, 1-55659-093-8 • CUSA