Wheeling Motel [Hardcover]

Franz Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2009

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 poet’s own brand of love, what he calls “one / strange alone / heart’s wish / to help all / hearts.” Poetry is indeed Wright’s 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 Wynette’s on the marquee” and he is visited by the figure of Walt Whitman, “examining the tear on a dead face.”

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

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Once more the Pulitzer Prize–winning Wright (God's Silence) delves into his own exceptionally troubled past and comes up with fractured and frightening—but also well-constructed and self-aware—poems about his former addictions, his inner depths and his recovery, giving thanks to his wife and to the Christian God. I don't want to see a doctor/ I want to kill a doctor, one poem opens. And this is my alone/ song, it isn't/ long. Wright's poetry of extremes has attracted both a wide audience and a sophisticated one: he speaks with terse authority about religious transcendence, crushing and even suicidal depression and well-known drug troubles—Pretty soon you won't be doing that to get high./ You'll be doing it to get dressed. If this collection differs from earlier volumes, it is in the kind and degree of attention that Wright pays to his father, the poet James Wright: There's this line in an unpublished poem of yours./ The river is like that,/ a blind familiar. Family matters, like much else, give Wright bleak grief: he turns, as he has often done in recent years, to religious faith, exploring his doubts but returning to his belief: The world didn't give me this/ word, but// the world cannot take it away. (Sept.)
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Review

“These new poems refract the light of the poet’s 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


From the Trade Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (September 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307265684
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265685
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #141,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Franz Wright's recent works include Earlier Poems, God's Silence, and The Beforelife (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). In 2004 his Walking to Martha's 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "No one is born sad.", October 6, 2009

By 

J from NY (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Wheeling Motel (Hardcover)

Franz Wright's latest collection of poems, "Wheeling Motel", shows the poet on a more reflective quest concerning his past; the Catholic faith is a sort of cradle for these broken diamonds of poems and reveries about both Wright's own past and some of his original poetic inspirations. Out of the millions of poems written about poor Charles Baudelaire, about whom W.H. Auden once wrote, "a strong man, yet weaker than any woman who has ever walked the earth", I think Wright transcends most of them with his calm yet firm judgment of the poet and his quest to probe the malevolent side of existence: "Evil isn't hard to comprehend/it is nothing/but unhappiness/in its most successful disguise/Evil is hated and feared at least/It is possessed/Unlike mere misery, of a dark glamour nobody pities." These two stanzas speak worlds not only about the legendary Dandy and lyric poet, but is a quietly epic commentary on the nature of evil as a whole.

His tenderness and quest for an answer, a metaphysical question regarding the doomed, addicted, and mentally ill in particular continues on a more serene note. His "No Answer No Why" stares these phenomena full in the face without blinking, also grouping ourselves within this tribe who differ perhaps only slightly from us. "Everyone who wakes up insane/with window and mirror wintry portrait of nowhere/Everyone Lord who wakes up in a cell/Everyone Lord who wakes up in the cancer bed/Everyone walking the streets with no home and intense frowning features of feigned occupation, feigned destination.." Isaiah's "plea for the widow" is here in abundance.

I think it should be stressed that Franz Wright is not a nay-sayer, for all his reflection upon the extremes of misery in human life--there are moments of hilarious dark humor in this collection which betray an artist who knows better than to take himself all that seriously. His mockery of the simplicity of the mental health system, which often reduces the wealth of the human psyche to a few simple questions and answers, can be seen in "Intake Interview", a farcical poetical detournment of the questions asked when one is admitted to a mental hospital. His struggle with and yet firm resolution to Christ's presence in the world and in the human heart is best embodied in "The Pew", I believe, one of the best poems about faith I have ever had the fortune to read.

These poems reflect like a miniaturist mirror, a la James Tate combined with the dark aestheticism of Gunter Eich, of a poet with an agonizingly exquisite sensibility trying to reconcile a chaotic past and a present into which the divine has peered. The most worthwhile poetry collection of 2009.

Wright can be heard reading 20 of these pieces with beautiful ambient background music on the CD "Wheeling Motel", also available from Amazon.com.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another beautiful collection, September 15, 2009

By 

Daniel J. Ahearn - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wheeling Motel (Hardcover)

Franz Wright is the poet of our generation.
Listen to him read these exquisite poems
Readings From Wheeling Motel

5.0 out of 5 stars some comfort, November 3, 2010

By 

Edith Hankel (the north woods) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wheeling Motel (Hardcover)

Franz Wright's work gets both sparer and deeper but remains as startling as ever. He's found a faith that never seems to ooze out of his poems but instead gives a place to stand while he looks at a world both painful and beautiful. This is a remarkable follow-up to the sharp-edged poems in "God's Silence" -- the poems are no less sharp in their clarity, but you can't slit your wrists with these. Read "Association," for example, where Wright says, "Dawns when I can't sleep I walk,/in thought, all the way/around Walden.//My father loved Thoreau, I wish/he could have walked there/ with me once,//My hungover Virgil."