Writers Recommend

Collection: One With Others

Author: C.D. Wright

Excerpt:
                      


      IN HELLS KITCHEN: Her apartment is smaller by half than the shotgun
 

shacks that used to stubble the fields outside of Big Tree. Stained from decades of
 

nonstop smoking. The world according to V was full of smoke and void of  

 

mirrors.

 

 

      She was not an eccentric. She was an original. She was congenitally

incapable of conforming. She was resolutely resistant.

 

 

      Her low-hanging fears no match for her contumacy

 

 

      Grappling hooks in the mud leaf out in the mind

Recommended by:

Peter Streckfus, who has recently been reading novels, poems, and essays that inhabit the mixed form, that alternate the prose paragraph and the poetic line.

Stated simply:

C. D. Wright’s One With Others is memorial in spirit, comprising documentary details Wright collects from interviews, archival research, and her own first-hand accounts. Her subjects are her friend and mentor V, who was a Civil Rights activist from rural Arkansas, and the history of the Civil Rights struggle in that area. To that end, Wright links prose, our culture’s default form for narrative, with our default form for lyric expression, the verse line. The result is not epic. Nor is it balladic. Nor is it journalism. And yet it is all of these.