Like Something Flying Backwards: New & Selected Poems: New and Selected Poems

by C.D. Wright

"One of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets" - "Publishers Weekly". C.D. Wright's work is enormously she is an experimental writer, a Southern writer, and a socially committed writer, yet she continuously reinvents herself with each new volume. Much of her poetry is rooted in the landscape and people of her childhood in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. This first UK edition of her work presents a wide range of her lyrics, narratives, prose poems and odes. Based on "Steal Away" (2003), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, its selection has been expanded to include more later work as well as new poems not yet published in book form in the US, including a major extended poem, "Rising, Falling, Hovering."

Genres: Poetry

303 pages, Paperback

Published April 10, 2007

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

C.D. Wright is probably my favourite poet of all time. I came across this book in Toppings in Ely a few years ago and had to buy it. Wright is an experimental writer but her work is addictively readable and she is not afraid to stray into the dark undercurrents. Her work has a casual sensuality, and a poem about something ordinary will sometimes knock you sideways with a line that is extraordinary and from some other realm.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

"deep step come shining" may be one of the strangest and most enjoyable long poems I've read.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Believe me I am not being modest when I
admit my life doesn’t bear repeating. I
agreed to be the poet of one life,

one death alone. I have seen myself
in the black car. I have seen the retreat
of the black car.” — “Our Dust”

[Karin Cope · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love CD Wright, I love this book, and have and will read it again and again. I love what she does with a line, the way she tells stories in shadows (intimation? but more than that...not just the old wordsworthian trope), her topics, her collaborations, the HEAT of her words...She's opened a window on a whole new poetic world.