In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love--both divine and human--and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company.
Whether he is writing about his regret for...

In this luminous new collection of poems, Franz Wright expands on the spiritual joy he found in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking to Martha s Vineyard. Wright, whom we know as a poet of exquisite miniatures, opens God s Silence with East Boston, 1996, a powerful long poem that looks back at the darker moments in the formation of his sensibility. He shares his private rules for bus riding ( No eye contact: the eyes of the terrified / terrify ), and recalls, among other experiences, his first encounter with a shotgun, as an eight-year-old boy ( In a clearing in the cornstalks . ....

Franz Wright was recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation even before he won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. His voice and sensibility are distinctive, and the places he goes are ones where not many writers are able or willing to venture. The dark world of his poems, which face many of the hardest truths we must learn to live with, is lit by humor, tenderness, compassion, and honesty. For this edition, the poet has selected from the best of his previous collections, in some cases making substantial revisions, and has added his newest poems. The resulting collection is exciting in its...

The haunting collection of poems that gathers the first four books of Pulitzer winner Franz Wright under one cover, where fans old and new will find a feast amid famine (Publishers Weekly), and discover how large this poet s gift was from the start."

Literary Nonfiction. Marick Press is happy to be publisher of Franz Wright's very first book of prose, some of it narrative, some of it dramatic, some of it highly lyrical, and much of it verging on the unclassifiable. This chapbook of seven of his prose pieces presages the publication by Knopf of Kindertotenwald, his collection of sixty-five prose pieces, in October of 2011. Those familiar with Wright's work will find many of the preoccupations and obsessions of his lyric poems present in his prose, but presented in a looser, more improvisatory and experimental form.

In his tenth collection of poetry, Franz Wright gives us an exquisite book of reconciliation with the past and acceptance of what may come in the future.
From his earliest years, he writes in -Will, - he had -the gift of impermanence / so I would be ready, / accompanied / by a rage to prove them wrong / . . . and that I too was worthy of love.- This rage comes coupled with the poet's own brand of love, what he calls -one / strange alone / heart's wish / to help all / hearts.- Poetry is indeed Wright's help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his...

Poetry. ENTRIES OF THE CELL is some of Franz Wright's best writing in years. "The cell will teach you all things" is a saying of some early Christians who, in the third century, bewildered to find that no matter what they did and no matter how powerful their faith, the new world they dreamed of far too closely resembled the irreparably corrupt old world. Their remedy to this dilemma was to withdraw from the cities of their time into the desolate solitude in which they found God's presence perpetually closer and more available to them. The saying has been adopted by the Society of the...