Steal Away: Selected and New Poems

Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new retablos and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright–with her Southern accent and cinematic eye–couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning.

from Our Dust

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.

Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle.–The New Yorker

Wright shrinks back from nothing.–Voice Literary Supplement

C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire.–American Letters

C.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.