Wheeling Motel: Poems (First Edition)

Franz Wright

ISBN 10: 0375711473 / ISBN 13: 9780375711473

Published by Knopf, New York, 2009

About this Item

New York: Knopf (2009). First edition. First printing. Hardbound. A tight clean copy, very fine/very fine in all respects. New! Comes with mylar dust jacket protector. Shipped in sturdy box. Smoke-free shop. Rear-Poetry.

Seller Inventory # 0710-56

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Wheeling Motel: Poems (First Edition)
• Publisher: Knopf, New York
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375711473
• ISBN 13: 9780375711473
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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.

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.