Customer Reviews

ILL LIT: Selected & New Poems

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I've been following Wright's career for years and find his compelling work burrows into the heart of the self--the mind and heart that speaks to itself--like no other poet. His work is heartbreaking as well as desperately funny. And his ability to hauntingly capture a state of mind using a few scattered images is frightening and magical. No poet since Frank Stanford has startled and excited me this much. I will read every poem of his I can get my hands on.

Franz Wright's "Ill Lit" is a challenging, alternately intellectual and poetic collection. Wright does an almost superhuman job of articulating the most minute aspects of the manifold. The overall feel of the work is a man writing from the deepest, darkest corners of mind and memory without once becoming vulgar or sordid. He does in those poems what Derrida and the deconstructionist crew aimed for but never achieved: destroying all dichotomies, eliminating the field between the verbal and the actual. "Say My Name" was my favorite piece: "I'd be entombed inside a period/in the closed book/in the huge dark/of St. Paul's/where we used to meet". This is more than recommended: Wright's voice is a like a vibrantly dim bulb flickering in the night of human existence.

Being son of the eminent James Wright, Franz has a lot looming over him. He responds to his world by fragmenting it into absolute terseness, collecting the shards of feeling & experience in a manner almost venomous but so tender. He writes with blindingly crisp ellipticism & manipulation of signifier & signified, traveling at speeds twice as fast as an omitted comma.

Franz Wright's ILL LIT is an alternatingly comical and serious look at humanity from the perspective of a young disillusioned man who stares at his ceiling fan all day contemplating more often than not, the rustling of the leaves and the state of the weather. With a lot of genius lines that really bring you to his level of thinking.