by Amelia Sage Van Donsel

“It is poetry that remarks on the barely perceptible disappearances from our world such as that of the sleeping porch or the root cellar. And poetry that notes the barely perceptible appearances.”
—C.D. Wright

When I met Forrest Gander and his son Brecht for an event in the Hudson Valley last May, The Essential C.D. Wright was just days from release. Forrest, who was married to the late poet C.D. Wright, was kind enough to read selections from The Essential and provide us with a few copies. I was shocked by how imposing the book was. It is shiny and robust, with a startlingly dark cover of a burned prairie field—a monoprint by the photographer Denny Moers, who worked with Wright. Hearing these poems aloud—some of which I was hearing for the first time—was astonishing, and not simply because of Forrest’s sonorous mode of recitation. Wright’s poetic voice was and is unmistakable; he spoke her into the room.  

The Essential C.D. Wright, edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers, is a selection of Wright’s most vital and stirring poems, published almost a decade after her unexpected death. The book was entirely crowd-funded for publication through Copper Canyon (Wright’s long-time press), and is just one of several collections that will honor Wright’s legacy as a poet. This gives you a sense of how many people have been deeply touched by Wright’s work and how it continues to bring new readers to poetry. The Essential is not only a long-awaited, carefully curated, comprehensive text of her work; it is also a testament to Wright’s legacy and her profound ability to resonate with nearly every person she touched. Forrest, whose elegiac collection Be With won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 and was longlisted for the National Book Award, continues to write for (to?) her, posthumously publishing her unfinished collection ShallCross with Copper Canyon in 2016 (her book opens with the dedication: “for Forrest / line, lank and long, / be with.”). The amorous reciprocity of these two poets continues to animate their work. 

I know I am not alone in saying that C.D. Wright remains a poet close to my heart—her work is funny, eerie, astonishing, inimitable. What this collection makes abundantly clear is how ambitious a poet Wright was—in the scale and profundity of her projects, in the inventiveness of her form, in the wit of her lines, in the devastation of her images. The text is divided into selections from all of her books, including some uncollected translations and drafts. But even before reaching the introduction, we are faced with pages and pages of photographs of Wright, which are gorgeously rendered—glossy, colorful, and thoughtful. Yet, more so, they are disarmingly tender portraits of Wright’s life, and her vibrance is immediately and keenly felt. Some images are more composed (authorial portraits or travel pictures, Wright often posing alone), while others are more intimate moments (Wright at home pregnant, lying with her son, or lost in thought). The photo and the poem speak the same language. And with text absent from these first pages, we begin to surrender to her presence. The beauty and love Wright carried is evident even before we reach her poems; I didn’t want her to end. 

The poems in this book met me with the same grace that Wright’s photographs did. I couldn’t help but think of Wright’s book One Big Self: An Investigation (2007)—a collection of documentary poems Wright composed while visiting/interviewing/teaching in Louisiana State Prisons with the photographer Deborah Luster, whose portraits of incarcerated individuals were printed on pieces of aluminum as a part of a larger project. I find Wright’s lifelong dedication to the exposure of injustice just as remarkable as her poetry. I think of Wright as a poetic activist—sharing a deep, palpable compassion for investigating humanity through language, handing us proof that humanity exists in places we’ve been told hold none. 

Her interest in incarceration brings her, with the utmost tenderness, into other systems of oppression. She was interested in the forgottenness of others, the “barely perceptible appearances,” including what is omitted from our internal narratives. In one of my favorite poems, “Tours,” Wright frankly addresses domestic abuse, which is overheard by a daughter who comes downstairs. We are struck over the head by the following image when the girl reaches the living room: “the piano stands there in the dark / like a boy with an orchid” (39). Despite Wright’s earlier work (including this poem) being more formally and grammatically tame, her later work is no less devastating. In The Essential, the reader can pass through decades of her work and watch her poems shift gracefully into longer pieces, which are sparse on punctuation and more liberated in form. While not dense per se, these poems all hold an amazing gravity; I found myself having to take breaks from my initial reading because of their emotional intensity. Because of her clear, sincere, and peculiar visions, Wright can establish a strikingly immediate intimacy with the reader—a reciprocal relationship that transcends and outlasts the page. Wright’s poems operate without much interest in time but with great consideration for personhood. Like all great poems, her work is multidimensional and resists the flattening and archival nature of anthologization. Rather, Wright’s voice is so uniquely omnipresent that she seems, always, to be vividly alive, looking into the reader’s eyes and making sure we’re paying attention. She is a poet of the outside—not just peering through windows, but banging down the door.

As the daughter of an Arkansas court reporter and judge, Wright composed poems almost as machines operating in the service of her unflinching moral compass, pointing us towards the thing that is ultimately the most human. She is also tongue-in-cheek, and then, sometimes, all teeth. I find her to be among the rare poets whose language still vibrates and surprises me, no matter how many times I reread a poem. In recordings of readings, Wright’s curt southern accent, hard enunciations, and quick blow through the poem are difficult to shake from the head. This experience is intensified by her diction, which is strange and sonically snappy, often including colloquial/vernacular speech. It is clear how precisely Wright’s ear worked, and, in return, her poems point us beyond the page and ask us to listen harder. Her poem from One Big Self titled, “In the Mansion of Happiness,” for instance, gets away with including both “fart” and “If I were a felon I’d be home by now” (9). Throughout all of her work, Wright is adept at using humor to disarm and devastate the reader. She was a master of making it seem, on the surface, as though her lines were common southern idioms, like the line: “I would wash a man’s feet and drink the water” (8). Her work is unusual and jarring, with surreal-ish imagery that feels like it can get away with a little bit of everything. Yet, her poems hold a compelling darkness, both in her subject matter and choice of language. Wright’s direct tone and angle of approach to difficult subjects catch the reader off guard, and her language throws us off-kilter; she often uses questions, for instance, as a way to corner the reader and force us to consider the nature of questions themselves, including the power dynamics involved. Too, she was interested in who is held accountable for the destruction of a life. She ends her poem “Clockmaker with Bad Eyes” with the following couplet: “love whatever flows. Cooking smoke, women’s blood, / tears. Do you hear what I’m telling you?” (47). Wright’s language is weird, clear, beautiful, and rendered with an unmistakably strong voice. 

This book of Wright’s poems is essential to her legacy because her poetry remains essential to so many readers. Yet, it is not so much preserving a legacy as it is keeping something alive and close to the heart. As Forrest writes in “A Tiny Introduction,” Wright “was constantly advocating, taking the initiative, championing those who would never even know how she had acted on their behalf” (xxviii). The breadth of work was selected with immense care; love is squeezed into these pages, which contain poems that Wright “considered durable.” The Essential C.D. Wright is—an almost too indulgent—privilege to hold and read and reread. This remarkably curated constellation of poems invites us to question the responsibilities and the capacities of both the poet and the reader.

Works Cited

Brouwer, Joel. Review of Rising, Falling, Hovering, by C.D. Wright. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Brouwer-t.html. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

The title of this review of The Essential C.D. Wright, “A School of One,” is a quote taken from Brouwer’s 2008 review of Wright’s Rising, Falling, Hovering.

Nelson, Cary. “69 Hidebound Opinions by C.D. Wright.” An Online Journal and Multimedia Companion to Anthology of Modern American Poetry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000, maps-legacy.org/poets/s_z/cdwright/opinions.htm. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.

Wright, C.D. The Essential C.D. Wright. 2025. Edited by Forrest Gander and Michael Wiegers, Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 13 May 2025.

Wright, C.D., and Deborah Luster. One Big Self: An Investigation. Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 1 Apr. 2007.