Axe in Blossom

The Pulitzer Prize winner’s final written work: poems of penetrating acceptance and humor, whose soul-sweeping gaze encompasses his own autobiography and the broken world he nonetheless gives thanks for “His hands strip poetry to its nub.” —Los Angeles Times “Reading [Wright] is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. . . . The shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking.” —Chicago Tribune “My death is in the second drawer;” writes Franz Wright. “While you’re standing there, would you mind getting me one?” It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, “I won’t have written any of it. / I will have back the rights / of anonymity;” and there is nothing left that anyone can take from him. Wright’s significant themes shine forth: radical acceptance of his own pain, mental illness, and loss; his belief in the poem’s ability to rhyme with the mysteries of our worldly suffering; his nearly surreal vision of Christian grace. But most powerful for readers will be the tender force of his imagery—the “green vesperal rain at the screen;” the “long Jeffersonian / $2-bill- / tinted twilight”—and; as he invites us to join him in his nicatorium, the smoking-porch of recovering addicts, the joy of finding this black-humorous voice still alive on the page to meet us.