The Essential C.D. Wright

The brilliant and multitalented Wright (Casting Deep Shade) died unexpectedly in 2016, leaving behind a legacy of astonishing breadth. This comprehensive and riveting volume, lovingly selected by the poet’s husband, Forrest Gander, and her longtime friend and editor Michael Wiegers, serves both the ardent fan and the newcomer to her work. Wright’s commitment to wonder and witness runs throughout like an iron wire, revealing a logic made newly legible by this collection: “Something is out there/ goddammit// And I want to hear it,” she writes in midlife. Twenty years later, she refines her aim “to unequivocally lay out the real feel of hard time.” Readers will observe the poet’s deepening practice of documentary poetics, from early lyric portraits of family, friends, and strangers in and beyond her Arkansas home (“some boys holed up in a derelict house/ after stoning a swan to death”) to book-length poems that combine voices in “a welter of associations.” Attuned especially to the poor and disenfranchised, the victims of racialized violence, and the incarcerated, these poems strive to represent people “as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves.” It’s a thrilling assemblage of Wright’s unforgettable writings. (May)