Now in paperback, Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning." from "Our Dust" You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity, I was the poet of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch phone books, of failed roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and sharpening shops, jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline factory on the penitentiary road. "Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."— The New Yorker "Wright shrinks back from nothing."— Voice Literary Supplement "C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire."— American Letters C.D. Wright has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers. It sometimes seems misleading to call Wright a poet; as her latest volume of poems makes clear, she is a chronicler of the travails that take place "between midnight and Reno," deeply interested in the social realities of America's poor and restless and in "towns with quarter-inch / phone books." Her appetite for digging up what she calls "protected and private things" results in poems about everything from sexual longing to America's incarceration system, but they are always alive to simple physical pleasures, like a trip to a twenty-four-hour supermarket. Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle, which she uses to evoke the haunted quality of our carnal existence—the paradox that the body is the source of language, and yet language outlasts our bodies. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker C.D. Wright, a Professor of English at Brown University, is the author of eleven books of poetry, as well as several collaborative works with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. She has earned fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations, and is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in Rhode Island.