One Big Self

by Deborah Luster and C.D. Wright

Book Overview

"For a long while now, C. D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature. One Big Self does to the contemporary prison-industrial complex what James Agee did to poverty -- it reacts passionately and lyrically (and idiosyncratically) to a sociopolitical abomination. This book, while angry and sorrowful and bewildered, has humor, constant levity and candor, and countless moments of incredible...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556592582
• ISBN13: 9781556592584
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 7.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

A trip into an unknown world

I'm a big C. D. Wright fan, anyway, and I especially liked this book. NPR had done a feature on the photography project that led to the writings featured here. She's done an outstanding job capturing the mood of the inmates and the country.

personal, intelligent poetry

I ordered this book accidentally, intending to have purchased the corresponding photo book. I'm glad not to have cast it aside as a mistake, and to have taken the time to read it. The writing is insightful, intelligent, sensitive & empathetic. It is personal without having been written in inscrutable code, multi-layered but available to be understood & appreciated on any level. The press that printed it did a beautiful job as well.

Amazing poetry

This is a book you read over and over again, the poetry falls down through language and past it into some netherworld between self and shadow. This is what great poetry should be and should do, make you want to write better, make you understand what it means to be human, undo language and then remake it. Thread life and story into typeface. And the book itself is beautiful. Copper Canyon doesn't make ugly books. So much poetry I read is endlessly about the self or is simply masturbating with language, or adhering to form until it becomes boring. Wright makes none of those mistakes. This poetry, relating to the prison system has weight. C. D. Wright is functioning at full power; it makes you want to write and it makes you want to give up writing all at once. Read this and read again what poetry is breaking into in the 21st century, a new place, a new rhythm.