Rising, Falling, Hovering - Digest

Reading • Rising, Falling, Hovering

As many commentators suggest, the idiosyncratic C.D. Wright is a school or movement of one, connecting the personal with the political (the war in Iraq, the post-Katrina debacle in New Orleans, illegal immigration, globalization/global capitalism) in her poetry.

Here she gives us her 12th book, from which this is excerpted:

Quietly, on Sunday,
in lieu of flowers
from poverty of divine direction
a crippling condition
watching a film a euphemism
for a bad movie watched before
a crippling condition
someone was coming to blow
away the fear
and names to be spoken
on her behalf
into a calabash
riding burro backwards
also cuts suffering

—Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008