"I recognize Kirby Wright as one of my own people, the citizens of the Pacific Rim. His heart is in Hawaii and California, aina and querencia. His fresh new voice sings love and concern for the beings along the shores and in the parks and gardens-and in the cities." -Maxine Hong Kingston

The poems in NOTES ABOVE WATER are concerned with the lives of suburbanites and their secret sufferings-alienation, boredom, infertility, and infidelity. Reoccurring family members are threaded through the book, particularly dysfunctional parents who seem oblivious to the pain they're inflicting on their kids. There's excruciating conflict between the narrator and June Spoon, an ice queen narcissist jealous of her children's relationships and marriages. And Dadio, who rarely spares the rod, uses his offspring to vent his frustrations as a high-powered attorney. The abusive past haunts the...

A landscape of acute memory and euphonious daily life, The Girl with the Green Violin delivers the raw and the cooked to readers. It is a poetry chapbook unmatched in its tender desire. Wright is an expert. When the speaker addresses a second person, it is we who feel its power. We salivate for each line before and after "You belong to me / Or at least the part of me // That makes you hunger." In each of these sixteen poems is sustenance and song.

Essay from the year 2012 in the subject Cultural Studies - Pacific Rim, grade: A, San Francisco State University, language: English, abstract: An older brother is determined to shoot a buck during his summer on Molokai island in order to prove he is a man. He is struggling with his identity and feelings of self-worth because his grandmother is always comparing him to his father who, as a boy, was a wunderkinder.

This collection of flash and poetry explores the secret interior worlds of characters dealing with intense emotional landscapes. Some of the pieces flash back in time to reveal the underpinnings of feelings of inadequacy, such as the narrator in "Butterfly Season," who recalls a lost love in high school and beatings as a boy. The flashes drive this book foward with intense relationship moments as couples either battle the odds to stay together or throw in the towel. There's even a flash ballad to the Beat Poets during their early days in New York.