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.

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 the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander ("I can just hear them on the telephone and keening all their kissy little knives"), or composing an ironic ode to himself ("To a Blossoming Nut Case"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose "secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover." Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.

Here is one of the poems from the collection:



Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now--

then it's changed,
I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

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 . . . it was suggested / that I fire / on that muttering family of crows"). Throughout this volume, Wright continues his penetrating study of his own and our collective soul. He reaches a new level of acceptance as he intones the paradox "I have heard God's silence like the sun," and marvels at our presumptions:
We speak of Heaven who have not yet accomplished
even this, the holiness of things
precisely as they are, and never will!
Though Wright often seeks forgiveness in these poems, his black wit and self-deprecation are reliably present, and he delights in reminding us that "literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry."
But in this book, literature wins as well. "God's Silence "is a deeply felt celebration of what poetry (and its silences) can do for us.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In poems that "unfold into miracles of uncontainable passion" ("Pittsburgh Post- Gazette), "Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright gives us a frank and haunting book about reconciliation: with the demons of the past and the complexities of the present.

A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize-winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright's most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.
In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured "yes" of creation--"it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last," Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet--"a fairly good egg in hot water," as he describes himself--who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. "Take everything," Wright suggests, "you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting." With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, "Kindertotenwald "pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

"Valzyhna Mort . . . can justly be described as a risen star of the international poetry world. Her poems have something of the incantatory quality of poets such as Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg. . . . She is a true original."-Cuirt International Festival of Literature

"[T]he searing work of Valzhyna Mort . . . dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her [and] to be battered by the moods of the Belarus language which she is passionately battling to save from obscurity."-"The Irish Times"

Valzhyna Mort is a dynamic young poet who writes in Belarussian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language in the aftermath of attempts to absorb it into Russian. Known throughout Europe for her live readings, Mort's poetry and performances are infused by the politics of language and the poetry of revolution, where poems are prayers and weapons.

"when someone spends a lot of time running
and bashing his head
against a cement wall
the cement grows warm
and he curls up with it
against his cheek
like a starfish . . ."

Valzhyna Mort is a Belarussian poet known throughout Europe for her remarkable reading performances. Her poetry has been translated into several languages, and she is the recipient of the Gaude Polonia stipendium and was a poet-in-residence at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in Virginia.

Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright earned an MFA in translation from the University of Arkansas. Franz Wright won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his book "Walking to Martha's Vineyard."

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.

Poetry. Poets speak metaphorically of poets of previous generations as their spiritual and artistic parents or grandparents. For Franz Wright, this is literally true: his father, James Wright, was one of the most influential American poets of the latter half of the twentieth century. In this book Franz Wright is more intimate than ever before. His collection is a description of the struggle with the demons associated with following in the lineage of a great poet. We can find more of Wright himself in this collection, more of his identity, a grown up man who finally conquers the stigma of living in the shadow of his father. The memories of James Wright are clear and vivid but not a torment. In poems like "Recurring Dream," "Admonitions To Self," "The Future," "Untitled Poem in Three Parts," Franz Wright steps into a new phase of his own writing, he is more accessible to the reader and lets us pick and choose among his hopes and reflections. He alternates between memories of his family and present experiences in a rental apartment. He reveals the splendor and grandiosity of a friendship in the short poem "The Future" where we find a generous man taking care of a fallen friend.

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 breadth, consistency, depth, and distinction.