One of the beautiful things about having a poet-friend is that said poet-friend is often willing to let you tag along in her reading adventures. She's finished reading and I'm only a third of the way through, but we're discussing CD Wright's Cooling Time over on "in conversation," and I welcome anyone to join us as the more voices are always the merrier.
It's a really wonderful, packed book, even if it is incredibly slender. My brain is dancing and my little highlighter tags are flying. There is much to be brought to the surface here.
From the back of the book:
An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing regularly from the peculiarities and backwards of the American idiom. The book's title derives from a line of legal defense, unique to Texas courts: if a person kills someone before having had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult, he is not guilty of murder. Ever focused on possibilities, C.D. Wright--who was called "one of America's oddest, best, and most appealing poets" by Publisher's Weekly and who just received a MacArthur Fellowship--demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives." Filled with humor, eroticism, and an hypnotic fascination with language, Cooling Time is a prickly love-letter to the life of poetry. As she writes: "Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do."
2 comments:
I've only read wright's poetry book that was about women's prisons but it was fascinating!
Just requested it from the SFPL.
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