In an acclaimed collection of taut, sensual poetry, award-winning poet C.D. Wright interweaves familiar, coloquial speech with strikingly inventive language, leaving each poem a distinctive entity, yet interconnected by linked metaphors and images.
C. D. Wright was born in Mountain Home, Arkansas. She earned a BA in French from Memphis State College (now the University of Memphis) in 1971 and briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue an MFA from the University of Arkansas, which she received in 1976. Her poetry thesis was titled Alla Breve Loving.
In 1977 the publishing company founded by Frank Stanford, Lost Roads Publishers, published Wright's first collection, Room Rented by A Single Woman. After Stanford died in 1978, Wright took over Lost Roads, continuing the mission of publishing new poets and starting the practice of publishing translations. In 1979, she moved to San Francisco, where she met poet Forrest Gander. Wright and Gander married in 1983 and had a son, Brecht, and co-edited Lost Roads until 2005.
In 1981, Wright lived in Dolores Hidalgo, Mexico and completed her third book of poems, Translation of the Gospel Back into Tongues. In 1983 she moved to Providence, Rhode Island to teach writing at Brown University as the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English. In 2013,
C.D. Wright died on January 12, 2016 at the age of 67 in Barrington, Rhode Island.
‘Glaringly insignificant. Predominantly flat fears. Go put your hands in some water. Light a fart. They all rise up and leave their hairs on the pillowcase. They all enter breath’s cul-de-sac in their own precious time. The body does not mourn its former bodies. The body leaves it ossuary for others to tend. Yet the body leans back on the trunk of an old friend, and says, because it is beautiful here, because it is so grotesque, because it is useless, vitiate it, slay it here. Now.’