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One with Others:
C.D. Wright examines a racist event in her native Arkansas and creates a layered, nuanced, and riveting tribute to V. Investigative journalism is the poet's realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the Civil Rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories--especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow--with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.
176 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2010
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About the author
C.D. Wright
43 books99 followersC. 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 69 reviews
April 9, 2012
The setting for this outstanding poetry collection, which won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is Forrest City, Arkansas, a small Delta town with nearly equal numbers of black and white residents, who lived in separate and very unequal conditions in 1969. Schools remained segregated, despite the passage of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision 15 years earlier, and although black residents were not formally excluded from white-owned establishments and neighborhoods, they knew that they were putting their lives at risk if they dared to anger any white person in town.
In March of that year, a school teacher at an all-black school in Forrest City was fired due to his participation in the town's fledgling civil rights movement, which included encouraging his students to engage in peaceful protests. The students, who were tired of attending classes in a decrepit building and having to use torn textbooks discarded by students at the all-white school, responded by nearly destroying the hated building and its contents. The local police, headed by a virulently racist sheriff, beat and arrested the youths, herded them into an empty swimming pool, and threatened to kill them en masse before they were eventually released.
Tension mounted in the broiling summer of 1969, as members of the John Birch Society stirred up extreme racial hatred amongst the town's white residents; most blacks cowed publicly, while a smaller number engaged in limited protests, and community leaders sought to organize a substantial protest movement. Help was requested from a group in nearby Memphis known as the Invaders, which became prominent in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike that led to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4. The Invaders were led by Lance "Sweet Willie Wine" Watson, a former hustler turned community activist and self appointed Messiah, and the group was portrayed as a group of dangerous, violent militants by the white media in Memphis. The group set off on a four day march from West Memphis, Arkansas to Little Rock, Arkansas, which included a stop in Forrest City. Local white officials there learned about the march, and a group of whites awaited their arrival.
C.D. Wright, who grew up in Arkansas and was a young woman in 1969, describes the events that took place in Forrest City that year, mainly through the eyes of her friend and mentor 'V', a white resident of the town who crossed over and supported the marchers, but also through interviews with other residents and information obtained from newspaper clippings. Wright expertly weaves these stories into a unique poetic narrative that brings the story to light and compellingly portrays the town's oppressive atmosphere and its black and white residents, none better than V:
She woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge, made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.
And, on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown.
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live{d} to bear children to a dunce.
{Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.}
She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
One with Others is easily one of the best poetry collections I've ever read, one whose terrifying beauty deserves to be widely appreciated and savored.
In March of that year, a school teacher at an all-black school in Forrest City was fired due to his participation in the town's fledgling civil rights movement, which included encouraging his students to engage in peaceful protests. The students, who were tired of attending classes in a decrepit building and having to use torn textbooks discarded by students at the all-white school, responded by nearly destroying the hated building and its contents. The local police, headed by a virulently racist sheriff, beat and arrested the youths, herded them into an empty swimming pool, and threatened to kill them en masse before they were eventually released.
Tension mounted in the broiling summer of 1969, as members of the John Birch Society stirred up extreme racial hatred amongst the town's white residents; most blacks cowed publicly, while a smaller number engaged in limited protests, and community leaders sought to organize a substantial protest movement. Help was requested from a group in nearby Memphis known as the Invaders, which became prominent in the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike that led to Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4. The Invaders were led by Lance "Sweet Willie Wine" Watson, a former hustler turned community activist and self appointed Messiah, and the group was portrayed as a group of dangerous, violent militants by the white media in Memphis. The group set off on a four day march from West Memphis, Arkansas to Little Rock, Arkansas, which included a stop in Forrest City. Local white officials there learned about the march, and a group of whites awaited their arrival.
C.D. Wright, who grew up in Arkansas and was a young woman in 1969, describes the events that took place in Forrest City that year, mainly through the eyes of her friend and mentor 'V', a white resident of the town who crossed over and supported the marchers, but also through interviews with other residents and information obtained from newspaper clippings. Wright expertly weaves these stories into a unique poetic narrative that brings the story to light and compellingly portrays the town's oppressive atmosphere and its black and white residents, none better than V:
She woke up in a housebound rage, my friend V. Changed diapers. Played poker. Drank bourbon. Played duplicate bridge, made casseroles, grape salad, macaroni and cheese. Played cards with the priest. Made an argument for school uniforms, but the parents were concerned the children would be indistinguishable. She was thinking: affordable, uniforms. You can distinguish them, she argued, by their shoes. It was a mind on fire, a body confined.
And, on the other side of Division, a whole other population in year-round lockdown.
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live{d} to bear children to a dunce.
{Yeats she knew well enough to wield as a weapon. It would pop out when she was put out. Over the ironing board. Over cards. Some years the Big Tree Catholic foursome would all be pregnant at once, playing bridge, their cards propped up on distended stomachs. Laughing their bourbon-logged heads off.}
She had a brain like the Reading Room in the old British Museum. She could have donned fingerless gloves and written Das Kapital while hexagons of snowflakes tumbled by the windowpanes. She could have made it up whole cloth. She could have sewn the cotton out of her own life. While the Thames froze over.
She loved: Words. Cats. Long-playing records. Laughter. Men.
Alcohol. Cigarettes. The supernatural. It makes for a carnal list. Pointless to rank. Five in diapers at once—a stench, she claimed, she never got used to.
One with Others is easily one of the best poetry collections I've ever read, one whose terrifying beauty deserves to be widely appreciated and savored.
July 27, 2011
I am a slow reader, especially with poetry, but I tore through this in one long sitting. The poetry at first seems distant from the intensity of Wright's early and middle books. Of course, the project reflects a larger aim, to capture the life of a personal hero of historical and social importance. The first level of brilliance in this book arrives with the blend of an objective documentary approach interspersed with collages of repeating found lines. The second level of brilliance arrives toward the end, when the momentum builds into a pure lyric grounded by all the literal groundwork that sets up the book. Wright honors her mentor through a poem that presents Wright's vision of her without distorting the woman by recasting her in a straight narrative or a contrived thematic lyric. You get a straight shot of poetry without pretenses written in a unique and masterful style.
January 12, 2017
Second read so much better. I got a lot of the larger motifs missed on my initial pass. Pitch perfect always, CDW. Documentary poetics done well.
August 25, 2011
I really liked this-- people have been raving about CD Wright for years, and I've been only a grudging believer; I liked Deepstep, but felt more mystified than pleased by it. This one, though, I can pretty whole-heartedly endorse.
It's another one of those weird books of poems that are more prose than verse, or so it seems in a lot of spots. But what the book really is, to sidestep the genre conversation at least a little, is an act of collage, (probably) re-casting existing accounts, performing new journalism, writing short lyrics, etc, to give a portrait of civil rights and one white woman's place in "the movement." It is moving, and not only in the rah-rah eyes on the prize way; V, the woman at the center of the book, seems to have really suffered, or at least been displaced, for her actions, and that is interesting to watch in the book's chronologically later scenes, in B'lyn.
It's true that the book is award bait, given it's author, format, and subject matter, and it's been duly rewarded for that. But I think it's a serious book in spite of the acclaim, and I really found it approachable without pandering. If I had a quibble, it's that the stories here feel rather hermetic-- the collage pieces are so complete and historically specific, they don't allow me to enter them fully as a reader. But maybe that's a failure of my reading. Still a great book.
It's another one of those weird books of poems that are more prose than verse, or so it seems in a lot of spots. But what the book really is, to sidestep the genre conversation at least a little, is an act of collage, (probably) re-casting existing accounts, performing new journalism, writing short lyrics, etc, to give a portrait of civil rights and one white woman's place in "the movement." It is moving, and not only in the rah-rah eyes on the prize way; V, the woman at the center of the book, seems to have really suffered, or at least been displaced, for her actions, and that is interesting to watch in the book's chronologically later scenes, in B'lyn.
It's true that the book is award bait, given it's author, format, and subject matter, and it's been duly rewarded for that. But I think it's a serious book in spite of the acclaim, and I really found it approachable without pandering. If I had a quibble, it's that the stories here feel rather hermetic-- the collage pieces are so complete and historically specific, they don't allow me to enter them fully as a reader. But maybe that's a failure of my reading. Still a great book.
November 19, 2017
Love love loved this book. My favorite use of the line in a book of collaged non-fiction I've read in a long time.
July 2, 2022
'To feel in conjunction with the changes
of my time. The most alive I've ever been.
My body lifted itself from the chair
it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.
To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.
Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign
has been directed against the main character,
an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings
like power lines; walked around free
and common as the air that bathes the globe or
sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence
smelling of Gaullists and café au lait. You have your life
until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know
or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.
No more damned if you did and damned if you didn't.'
(p138-139)
of my time. The most alive I've ever been.
My body lifted itself from the chair
it walked to where I saw a silent crowd.
To act, just to act. That is the glorious thing.
Yet it has come to my attention that a whisper campaign
has been directed against the main character,
an invisible woman. She could have buried her feelings
like power lines; walked around free
and common as the air that bathes the globe or
sued the chickenshits and gone to live in Provence
smelling of Gaullists and café au lait. You have your life
until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know
or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you.
No more damned if you did and damned if you didn't.'
(p138-139)
November 26, 2017
Stunning. Echoes the ghosts of history. Unfortunately, still relevant, as long as we refuse the dignity of darker brothers, as long as hate attempts to reassert itself. Particularly moving for me since much of my formative years were spent in Wright’s hometown, and though younger than she, I know all too well the false supremacy and mindless fear she exposes. Gone from us too soon, Wright is a prophet.
February 9, 2019
A history telling like I've never encountered before.
December 23, 2025
One of the best (if not the best) books of poetry I have ever read. Masterful “blending of poetry and investigative journalism.”
August 15, 2014
"What the white man wanted, no less than complete control"
Here in St. Louis, Missouri these days the lessons of the past are hitting us hard. People in the St. Louis area, with the Fergusson riots and protests, sparked by the police shooting of an unarmed black youth, are realizing that their city is highly segregated and that by and large this segregation is held up by a racist and increasingly militarized police force. But with these lessons also come hints that unfortunately, we have been here before, and that lesson leads one to fear that unless there is a huge paradigm shift, we will unfortunately tread this terrible terrain again. Or we are already are. Racism might never be relegated to "the past", and honest change requires absurdly, sometimes catastrophically difficult growing pains. Will racism ever really not exist in THIS society?
Enter C.D. Wright's recent historical-poetic book "One With Others". The book tells a tapestry of yarns and stories centering around "V", a mentor of Wright's and white woman who fought for civil rights in the extremely racist rural Arkansas South of the late 1960s. She is in exile from the white community for doing this, and towards the end of the book and thusly her life V descends into alcoholism and destitute near-obscurity. Foremost as well at the center of gravity of the poem is an event where black children at the Junior High School are locked in an empty public pool, and intimated and humiliated, and in contrast, the March to End Fear--a grueling march by the black citizens simply to show that they had a right, to well, walk along the roadside and not be gunned down by cops or biggots--and the school-riots of the children when a teacher in the school is fired for telling the Superindentent that "The Negro Has No Voice".
The voice(s) of the poem are symphonic and a tapestry of fragments. Presumably, Wright conducted interviews with many of the players of this chapter in Arkansas civil rights during the current day, and channels their voices in her book via a floating sea of images and stark sayings from her real life characters.
Stylistically the poem is a tight version of disparate sources emerging through Wright as an observer and a liaison from which the dignified obscurity of these characters currently find themselves. Filled with un-self-conscious narrative and line-thought shifts and peopled with stark and resonant imagery, the real life characters, just like the historical narrative itself are given a second life in Wright's book.
What lesson's can we learn? It can all be summed up in the transcription of the Goya print that V keeps in her Hell's Kitchen apartment..."The Sleep of Reason Brings Monsters". And for me I would say that the "lessons" of the past are never as far away as we may hope. And that acting for justice or a better life is an ends to itself, worth the fight.
Here in St. Louis, Missouri these days the lessons of the past are hitting us hard. People in the St. Louis area, with the Fergusson riots and protests, sparked by the police shooting of an unarmed black youth, are realizing that their city is highly segregated and that by and large this segregation is held up by a racist and increasingly militarized police force. But with these lessons also come hints that unfortunately, we have been here before, and that lesson leads one to fear that unless there is a huge paradigm shift, we will unfortunately tread this terrible terrain again. Or we are already are. Racism might never be relegated to "the past", and honest change requires absurdly, sometimes catastrophically difficult growing pains. Will racism ever really not exist in THIS society?
Enter C.D. Wright's recent historical-poetic book "One With Others". The book tells a tapestry of yarns and stories centering around "V", a mentor of Wright's and white woman who fought for civil rights in the extremely racist rural Arkansas South of the late 1960s. She is in exile from the white community for doing this, and towards the end of the book and thusly her life V descends into alcoholism and destitute near-obscurity. Foremost as well at the center of gravity of the poem is an event where black children at the Junior High School are locked in an empty public pool, and intimated and humiliated, and in contrast, the March to End Fear--a grueling march by the black citizens simply to show that they had a right, to well, walk along the roadside and not be gunned down by cops or biggots--and the school-riots of the children when a teacher in the school is fired for telling the Superindentent that "The Negro Has No Voice".
The voice(s) of the poem are symphonic and a tapestry of fragments. Presumably, Wright conducted interviews with many of the players of this chapter in Arkansas civil rights during the current day, and channels their voices in her book via a floating sea of images and stark sayings from her real life characters.
Stylistically the poem is a tight version of disparate sources emerging through Wright as an observer and a liaison from which the dignified obscurity of these characters currently find themselves. Filled with un-self-conscious narrative and line-thought shifts and peopled with stark and resonant imagery, the real life characters, just like the historical narrative itself are given a second life in Wright's book.
What lesson's can we learn? It can all be summed up in the transcription of the Goya print that V keeps in her Hell's Kitchen apartment..."The Sleep of Reason Brings Monsters". And for me I would say that the "lessons" of the past are never as far away as we may hope. And that acting for justice or a better life is an ends to itself, worth the fight.
December 17, 2011
Predates the Help (#1 read in local books stores in 2011) & is so much better (truer, more authentic, whatever you want to call it)than that bestseller. No stereotyped white frat boys or stereotyped debutantes as easy villains. Nor stereotyped philandering black husbands for that matter. But rather, one white woman, as well as many black civil rights activists, with plenty of warts & flaws and some very admirable virtues & appealing idiosyncrasies. This book just brought so much to mind, past and present. History & the very personal life both.
January 17, 2011
"I used all of my life."
"I'm small, I just take care of the small."
"The world is not ineluctably finished / though the watchfires have been doused"
"She could have buried her feelings/ like power lines"
"You forfeit the only life you know/ or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you."
"I'm small, I just take care of the small."
"The world is not ineluctably finished / though the watchfires have been doused"
"She could have buried her feelings/ like power lines"
"You forfeit the only life you know/ or go to your grave with the song curdled inside you."
April 10, 2015
I'll say, this is a book of poetry that needs to be understood in order to be appreciated.
I wouldn't have gotten this on my own, so I'm glad I read this for a class.
This prose poetry follows C.D. Wright as she follows V: a woman who crossed Division in the time of the Civil Rights Movement.
I wouldn't have gotten this on my own, so I'm glad I read this for a class.
This prose poetry follows C.D. Wright as she follows V: a woman who crossed Division in the time of the Civil Rights Movement.
July 2, 2011
I wonder what C.D. Wright smells like.
December 5, 2025
I was confused, and didn’t find it to enjoyable to read. There were very strong moments. Here’s my analysis:
Wright’s One With Others reads like a communal archive. Oral history, reportage, and lyric sections braid together to show how private conscience collides with public life. The collage form is not ornament. It is an ethics of listening. Voices overlap, correct, and amplify one another, which turns memory into a present tense practice rather than a museum of facts. The book asks a simple but demanding question: what does it mean to be “one with others” when doing so carries a cost?
Wright writes, “It is known that when a blackbird calls in the marsh all sound back and if one note is missing all take notice. This is the solidarity we are born to” (p. 107). The marsh sets a shared sound field where a single call becomes relation. “Sound back” reads like a norm, so response is expected, not exceptional. The phrase “one note is missing” shifts attention to absence and erasure, and it makes those absences legible to the group. The sentence arrives as observation in present tense, which makes solidarity feel empirical rather than abstract. Across the book, Wright’s chorus of testimonies, fragments, and lists performs the same acoustics. Witness begins with attention, and attention is already a form of collective care.
The opening author’s note tells us how to read these ethics of attention. Wright frames the project as “a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition,” and says it “aspires to the borrowed tuxedo-lining of fiction” (p. 3). Quoting that last clause matters because it defines fiction as supportive fabric, not disguise. The “lining” lets testimony move in public while acknowledging seams. The stated “holes” on p. 3 rhyme with the “missing” note on p. 107. Together they make a claim about truth: gaps are not failures to be hidden but cues that call the community to “sound back.” In this light, the book’s hybrid method is not aesthetic flair. It is an ethic that turns documentation into shared vigilance.
Wright’s One With Others reads like a communal archive. Oral history, reportage, and lyric sections braid together to show how private conscience collides with public life. The collage form is not ornament. It is an ethics of listening. Voices overlap, correct, and amplify one another, which turns memory into a present tense practice rather than a museum of facts. The book asks a simple but demanding question: what does it mean to be “one with others” when doing so carries a cost?
Wright writes, “It is known that when a blackbird calls in the marsh all sound back and if one note is missing all take notice. This is the solidarity we are born to” (p. 107). The marsh sets a shared sound field where a single call becomes relation. “Sound back” reads like a norm, so response is expected, not exceptional. The phrase “one note is missing” shifts attention to absence and erasure, and it makes those absences legible to the group. The sentence arrives as observation in present tense, which makes solidarity feel empirical rather than abstract. Across the book, Wright’s chorus of testimonies, fragments, and lists performs the same acoustics. Witness begins with attention, and attention is already a form of collective care.
The opening author’s note tells us how to read these ethics of attention. Wright frames the project as “a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition,” and says it “aspires to the borrowed tuxedo-lining of fiction” (p. 3). Quoting that last clause matters because it defines fiction as supportive fabric, not disguise. The “lining” lets testimony move in public while acknowledging seams. The stated “holes” on p. 3 rhyme with the “missing” note on p. 107. Together they make a claim about truth: gaps are not failures to be hidden but cues that call the community to “sound back.” In this light, the book’s hybrid method is not aesthetic flair. It is an ethic that turns documentation into shared vigilance.
February 11, 2023
In which C.D. Wright excavates an incident of racial cordon sanitaire, involving a group of high school students in Arkansas, in late 1969, who, in solidarity with activists in a March Against Fear from Memphis to Little Rock, walked out of school and were held captive in a public pool, and a friend of the poet's, one "V," was made to testify, though she would not, not against students, nor the activists.
Needless to say, the difficulty of representing such an event, so far, now, in 2010's past, must be what warrants the difficult text through which Wright represents it. Wright "objectivates" it, stepping back from representing herself, and allowing in a grand collage of voices, documents, spectral figures in "V"'s background. She eroticizes her textual sources, allowing them to merge and generate a "V," as herself something of a type, married, Catholic, and with numerous children, something of the haggard biddy, subject to a religion "that makes martyrs of women and emasculates men," by her own admission. "V"'s ally-ship with Arkansas blacks at this crucible in the Civil Rights struggle is what her younger mentee admires in her, inspiring the feminist investigatory poetry of document, inventory, testimony, and demography. The outrage of this small town ("Big Tree" seemingly a composite of Mountain Home and other places in northeastern Arkansas) woman having an involvement in poetry (Yeats, et. al) is perhaps all the warrant Wright needs in scaling her own posthumous apprenticeship through ethnographical research. C.D. Wright was from Mountain Home but it didn't take her long be Brown University's own. They'll never need to repudiate this book.
Needless to say, the difficulty of representing such an event, so far, now, in 2010's past, must be what warrants the difficult text through which Wright represents it. Wright "objectivates" it, stepping back from representing herself, and allowing in a grand collage of voices, documents, spectral figures in "V"'s background. She eroticizes her textual sources, allowing them to merge and generate a "V," as herself something of a type, married, Catholic, and with numerous children, something of the haggard biddy, subject to a religion "that makes martyrs of women and emasculates men," by her own admission. "V"'s ally-ship with Arkansas blacks at this crucible in the Civil Rights struggle is what her younger mentee admires in her, inspiring the feminist investigatory poetry of document, inventory, testimony, and demography. The outrage of this small town ("Big Tree" seemingly a composite of Mountain Home and other places in northeastern Arkansas) woman having an involvement in poetry (Yeats, et. al) is perhaps all the warrant Wright needs in scaling her own posthumous apprenticeship through ethnographical research. C.D. Wright was from Mountain Home but it didn't take her long be Brown University's own. They'll never need to repudiate this book.
August 27, 2025
I don’t know what it is about prose poetry, but when it’s right it is so, so right. This is a memorable book for several reasons. It’s an admirable work of archival research, which Wright did to inform the wider public about The March Against Fear in a small town in Arkansas—the lengthy list of sources and acknowledgments attests to her attention to detail. Then, of course, the subject material (just mentioned). Then, of course of course, her writing. I haven’t read anything else by Wright, but her prose does not punch any softer for its brevity and lightness. The line-broken verses are more powerful for existing in smaller quantities than in most poetry collections.
“You have your life / until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know / or go to the grave with the song curdled inside you” (CD Wright, “One with Others,” p. 139).
“The world is not ineluctably finished / though the watchfires have been doused” (CD Wright, “One with Others,” p. 141).
You should read this. It feels tragically relevant now.
“You have your life / until you use it. You forfeit the only life you know / or go to the grave with the song curdled inside you” (CD Wright, “One with Others,” p. 139).
“The world is not ineluctably finished / though the watchfires have been doused” (CD Wright, “One with Others,” p. 141).
You should read this. It feels tragically relevant now.
July 10, 2019
This was an incredible work. I did have trouble at first feeling like I could follow it, I think it would be helpful to read about Sweet Willie Wine, the invader and his march in Arkansas to have some framework, but about 30 pages in you are getting plenty. Wright combines first hand witness dialogue and research with poetry.
One of the people who took part in the March against Fear was a white mom of four kids. She was ostracized for it, her husband lost his job and so divorced her. This is the person that CD Wright new personally in New York. She mixes in her last memories of time with V. (Margaret Kaelin McHugh) with her experience and lots of other first hand witnesses white and black.
I look forward to reading this one again.
One of the people who took part in the March against Fear was a white mom of four kids. She was ostracized for it, her husband lost his job and so divorced her. This is the person that CD Wright new personally in New York. She mixes in her last memories of time with V. (Margaret Kaelin McHugh) with her experience and lots of other first hand witnesses white and black.
I look forward to reading this one again.
July 25, 2017
I saw her read this twice over the course of four to five years. It's a snapshot not only of the Deep South, but of Arkansas, a state with inherent political contradictions, giving us Faubus, Fulbright, then Clinton, then the main character of this work, one white woman who served as class and race traitor (not used pejoratively here or lightly) who for all her troubles to support the civil rights movement was forced into exile in New York. I found the collage technique more moving and revelatory on the page largely due to my ability to retain the background and situations.
March 2, 2024
I think the most fitting way to describe this piece of writing is to call it a lyric poem. It is in many ways the hero’s journey - replete with detours, blockades, and challenges. Through it all though, it’s the presentation of a specific life in a specific moment in time, with all the attendant beauty and horror. If you are an avid Civil Rights reader, this is for you. If you are just starting to understand our current quagmire of white supremacy, this is also for you. If you are q poet, a seeker, a truth-teller, this is for you.
May 17, 2019
At first I thought, this isn’t my kind of book. By the end, I was amazed that even the credits were interesting. C.D. Wright’s poetic prose reminded me of the racism I was so accustomed to in childhood that I didn’t think much about it until the 60s and the civil-rights movement took hold. Her words also reminded me of Vietnam where our white leaders sent 18-year-olds to kill or be killed but said they were too young to vote. And she reminded me of an era of hate that’s both past and present.
July 20, 2021
I've never read anything like this. Wright's ability to use poetry and prose as a means of communicating her investigative journalism was incredible. There was a lot to take in with every line and I think it's a book that I'll need to re-read to truly grasp the depth of storytelling and journalism woven into Wright's writing.
April 16, 2024
One of those books I could not put down. It’s been a minute since I read long-form poetry I really liked, so this hit the spot and absolutely blew me away. The cadence of the refrains that crept up at unexpected moments really contributed to this book’s haunting effect. The amount of archival research packed into this poem is also just really inspirational.
November 20, 2018
A brave book. Investigative journalism with a heart of social justice. Poetry seems the humblest mode to
tell these stories of ordinary people. C.D. Wright is a civil rights marcher herself.
tell these stories of ordinary people. C.D. Wright is a civil rights marcher herself.
November 25, 2018
I love Mary Blair. This will be a book that I will be pulling off of the shelf again in the future
January 2, 2020
Read at one sitting at a Memphis kitchen table.
September 25, 2023
I loved this masterpiece of poetry by C. D.Wright about 20th century race relations in Arkansas told through the persona of V, a teacher at a white school. V joined a freedom march, lost her livelihood, had her vehicle burned, and herself delivered across the state border by a sheriff’s deputy. This subject matter told in Wright’s distinctive poetry, which has about it the clarity of documentary realism, is beautiful and compelling. Somehow Wright makes the highest level of poetic diction and form into something unputdownable. “I used all of my life. I told my friend Gert, you’ve got your life until you use it.” A National Book Award Finalist.
November 28, 2023
Poetry … sort of
April 22, 2024
Sometimes you stumble upon something blindly and it completely knocks you out. This unique piece of prose poetry did this to me.
June 4, 2024
A sensational & moving docupoetics project. Whew.
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