Wheeling Motel: Poems

(Paperback)

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Description

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 poets own brand of love, what he calls one / strange alone / hearts wish / to help all / hearts. Poetry is indeed Wrights help, and he delivers it to us with a wry sense of the daily in America: in his wonderfully local relationship to God (whom he encounters along with a catfish in the emerald shallows of Walden Pond); in the little West Virginia motel of the title poem, on the banks of the great Ohio River, where Tammy Wynettes on the marquee and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, examining the tear on a dead face.

Here, in Wheeling Motel, Wrights poetry continues to surprise us with its frank appraisal of our soul, and with his own combustible loneliness and unstoppable joy.

Reviews

These new poems refract the light of the poets insightful, humorous, and often humble gaze in ways that are surprising and rewarding. America

Uningratiating, bumptiously witty . . . and routinely surprising. The New York Times Book Review

Author Bio

Franz Wrights recent works include Earlier Poems, Gods Silence, and The Beforelife (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). In 2004 his Walking to Marthas Vineyard received the Pulitzer Prize. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He currently lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, the translator and writer Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.