Absolutely incredible. ( )

I love C.D. Wright, and I'm not afraid to say it. For over twenty years, she's been at the forefront of verse, form, and language.

Steal Away collects selected verse from 1982 until the present, showcasing her early whit and play with form and language, her movements marrying narrative and image, and her perfection of the list poem. She changes form and style as easily as you or I might our socks. Her partnering of line to form, her use of punctuation as line break and line break as punctuation, and space as breath, are the building blocks of her work. The things many poets struggle to combine in their own poetry kitchens, C.D. Wright wields with ease and grace.

Her subjects are as varied as her approaches. In one poem she may weave the day to day of motherhood as a literal laundry list, and in another may confront the body politic with a series of periodless prose blocks. She muses on seasons and urban streetscapes in semi-traditional line and meter on one page, only to then launch into twenty pages of post-surrealist Oppenesque lines which using no space and changing twenty aesthetic approaches across the entire span.

The reason I myself love C.D. Wright, is because I can see in her the poetic ingredients that I love to reach back into for my own work; Language Poetry, New York School, Black Mountain, Surrealism, Modernism, Imagism (not to mention a political feminism so subtle as to be screaming), she is the culmination of 20th century American poetry. This book is a must read for anyone writing today, one of the pivotal benchmarks for we younger poets as we look to write our way into the next century. ( )