Franz Wright

A collection of poems on life, blessing, and renewal by Franz Wright, including "Year One," "The First Supper," and "Walking to Martha's Vineyard."

Walking to Martha's Vineyard

A new compilation of poetry by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Walking to Martha's Vineyard features the powerful long poem "East Boston, 1996," a work that evokes some of the darker moments and experiences that informed the development of his sensibility, and analyzes his own and the collective human soul. 10,000 first printing.

Poems

God's Silence

A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet. In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us. He introduces us to the powerful presences in his world (the haiku master Basho, Nietzsche, St. Teresa of Avila, and especially his father, James Wright) as he explores the continually unfolding loss of childhood and the mixed blessings that follow it. Taken together, the pieces deliver the diary of a poet—“a fairly good egg in hot water,” as he describes himself—who seeks to narrate his way through the dark wood of his title, following the crumbs of language. “Take everything,” Wright suggests, “you can have it all back, but leave for a little the words, of all you gave the most mysteriously lasting.” With a strong presence of the dramatic in every line, Kindertotenwald pulls us deep into this journey, where we too are lost and then found again with him.

Prose Poems

Kindertotenwald

Earlier Poems

Presents a portrait of an addict in recovery through a collection of poems that captures the seductive legacy of an alcoholic father, the isolation of addiction, and the desperate battle between the grasp of mental illness and addiction and the promise of a new life.

The Beforelife

Poetry

The Night World and the Word Night

Selected & New Poems

ILL LIT

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.

Wheeling Motel

A collection of poems reflecting the regard for life in every form and the belief in the promise of blessing and renewal, sharing through a series of prayer-like works observations of such topics as a suicidal animal, snowflakes, and love.

Collects the author's first four books of poetry.

Un poemario sobre la conciencia de la propia muerte muy clarividente y libre de drama. Mientras consideraba su mortalidad, Franz Wright encontró una nueva euforia y claridad en la página, entregando para nuestro examen el "yo" defectuoso pero arrodillado en gratitud en el que se había convertido. Desde «Entries of the Cell», el largo poema central que detalla la soledad del alma soltera, hasta breves poemas narrativos en prosa y letras tradicionales, Wright se deleita en el poder compensatorio del lenguaje, observando los faros diurnos que siguen a un coche fúnebre, o el viento, «bendiciendo uno por uno los capullos sin luz del regreso inadvertido del melocotonero doblado hacia atrás».

F / Poemas

Fragments, jejune & fundamentally meaningless parables, frankly self-evident paradoxes, bedtime stories rewritten for crybabies, prestidigitatory prevarications succumbed to at last at the height of his powers a tragic loss to letters, sprawling circumlocutory aphorisms & other revels.

The Toy Throne

Poetry. ENTRIES OF THE CELL is some of Franz Wright's best writing in years. "The cell will teach you all things" is a saying of some early Christians who, in the third century, bewildered to find that no matter what they did and no matter how powerful their faith, the new world they dreamed of far too closely resembled the irreparably corrupt old world. Their remedy to this dilemma was to withdraw from the cities of their time into the desolate solitude in which they found God's presence perpetually closer and more available to them. The saying has been adopted by the Society of the Brotherhood of St. John the Evangelist where, at their Cambridge branch, T. S. Eliot attended services while teaching at Harvard in the thirties. Dedicated to Franz Wright's friend Palestinian poet Fady Joudah—good husband, dad, emergency room MD in Houston and American translator of Mahmoud Darwish—the book is a single poem. Its title is meant to suggest all kinds of cells—body, jail, but primarily the cell in the sense of the small functional bare room in which a monk prays, studies and sleeps.

Entries of the Cell

20 Poems

God While Creating the Birds Sees Adam in His Thoughts

Address

Literary Nonfiction. Marick Press is happy to be publisher of Franz Wright's very first book of prose, some of it narrative, some of it dramatic, some of it highly lyrical, and much of it verging on the unclassifiable. This chapbook of seven of his prose pieces presages the publication by Knopf of Kindertotenwald, his collection of sixty-five prose pieces, in October of 2011. Those familiar with Wright's work will find many of the preoccupations and obsessions of his lyric poems present in his prose, but presented in a looser, more improvisatory and experimental form.

Franz Wright

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