Rising, Falling, Hovering [Hardcover]

C.D. Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

C.D. Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”

Rising, Falling, Hovering is a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. “We are running on Aztec time,” she writes, “fifth and final cycle.”

In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright’s language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the corpses
in the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.
Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.
Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, the
evangelicals. . .

C.D. Wright, author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, is a professor of English at Brown University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In her first collection of new lyric poems since 2003, Wright braids some of her most personal and intimate poetry to date with an extended meditation on the consequences of America's contemporary stance toward other countries. Short, elliptical lyrics, featuring Wright's trademark repetition of lines and sharp wit, which interrogate their own speaker and a companion (She is not really hearing what he's really saying) flank the two-part title piece, a long poem that is a travelogue of a trip to Mexico at the beginning of the current war in Iraq. Everywhere the shell-shocked speaker goes, she finds people mesmerized// by the new media-borne war, while she feels Ashamed of her solace in being here because, now more than ever, to be ashamed is to be American. As the lines blur between tourism and empire, and as images and impressions accrue (Whole new breed of dog born in every warren), the poem's speaker also reflects on the safety and precariousness of her own family. This book displays a new level of social and personal consciousness for Wright (One Big Self), who characterizes the powerful ambivalence that now accompanies life in America, where injustice may be the price of freedom, and where poetry/ doesn't/ protect/ you/ anymore. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 100 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556592736
• ISBN-13: 978-1556592737
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,122,718 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At its very best, May 4, 2008

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rising, Falling, Hovering (Hardcover)

When poetry is at its very best it is a form of communication that compels a response from its audience. That response can arise from anywhere on the spectrum of human emotion and psychology. Such is the case with the seminal verse of C. D. Wright as compiled within the pages of "Rising, Falling, Hovering" from Copper Canyon Press. An award winning poet with twelve previously published volumes of her work, this latest and enthusiastically recommended collection is infused throughout with wit, honesty, emotional intensity, as it touches upon such diverse issues as technology, capitalism existential crisis, and candid observation of the human condition. 'Like Something Christenberry Pictured': ...stepping out of the story/ (ineluctably over, fellow travelers)/here just long enough to testify/to a blinding intensity/under that big dry socket of god/the camera mounted to capture/ordinary traffic violations/fixes instead on your final face/a single frame of unadulterated/urgency is what you see, urgency it is'.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best Yet, February 10, 2009

By 

K. Douglas Anderson (willimantic, connecticut) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rising, Falling, Hovering (Hardcover)

C.D. Wright continues to redefine the limits of poetry as the genre struggles to rediscover itself. Her experiments with form are refreshing as ever and her politics are layered in so organically that they will not, in ten years, stand out as merely "topical" references, but be the news that stays news. She is the only person I know who is really doing this work right now. In spite of her startling and discomfiting innovations, she is flesh and soul, full of grief and tenderness, always connected to a larger vision than that which is usually revealed in typically monological poetry. She is writing poetry in a time that she describes as "...no time for poetry" and yet she finds the poem, time after time, against hope.

3.0 out of 5 stars Good when it's good, mediocre when it's not, March 21, 2011

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rising, Falling, Hovering (Hardcover)

C. D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

I have to say, the alarms started going off in my head when the inside flap copy called this book "politically ferocious". Despite that, I was with her for a while, but eventually the message did overtake the medium, as I feared. In fact, it got to the point where we headed into the land of "this is prose ranting chopped up into little lines to make it look like poetry" by the second half of the title poem:

"According to the Gaia hypothesis, the earth is alive;

According to Lieutenant Colonel Venable white phosphorous
is not a chemical weapon, is an incendiary.

It is an obscurant, it is for illumination;
nor are we a signatory of any treaty restricting its use...."
(--"Rising, Falling, Hovering (cont.)")

But for all that, I have to say that when Wright isn't using poetry to air political grievances, and instead concentrating on the good old dictum "no ideas but in things" (and thank you endlessly for that, Mr. Williams), she's quite a good writer. There's a lot to be gotten out of this book, especially the first half, but you've got to wade through a few swine to find the pearls here. Whether it's worth your time depends on how willing you are to do so. ** 1/2