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A CHANGE OF MAPS

A CHANGE OF MAPS

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9762114-3-3

Pub Date: Fall 2006

Pages: 112


By Carolyne Wright


Carolyne Wright explores in poetry what it means to live in different worlds, and probes with great sensitivity what it means to live in two or more different worlds at the same time . . . Wright writes with passion, eloquence, and clear moral perspective.

—Andrew Hudgins


“Formally elegant, thematically intelligent, urgent and thoughtful, A Change of Maps traverses the American landscape—its primal beauty and human diminishment—and explores the tensions in the nature of this country, its mix of cultures, and its losses both national and personal. In these brilliant and intuitive poems, Carolyne Wright reflects on love and independence, love and work, choices made in youth and the larger awarenesses that enable the world and the species to continue.”

—Betsy Sholl

    “Carolyne Wright’s poems adventure with candor and heart—traveling into the hushed-up Fifties, onto subway platforms, through rain storms, through early drafts of love and the heart’s sub-zero weather. Everywhere, Wright sees her native territory with travel-widened eyes, even when moving across the brown lawns of Mid-America. Here, Argus and Preacher Bob co-exist, also ghazals and microchips, the Bronze Age and rusted Westinghouses, the shaman and the xerox machine. As childhoods wave goodbye, and whole coastlines wander off, Wright finds pinions in music (it is her job, she says, to mimic the wild crane’s cry), and in the promise of life unfolding. This poet carries a passport whose exit visas—like her poems—are a measure of a buoyant survival.”

    —Emily Hiestand


    “Although Wright may be regarded as a wanderer of the globe, her poems are crisp, precise, and controlled explosions of revelation, wit, and insight. Her first poem in A Change of Maps, “Studies with Miss Bishop,” exemplifies the formalism Wright was taught by her teacher, Elizabeth Bishop. An abecedarian form—beginning both lines of each couplet with each letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order—this clever slant-rhymed poem introduces readers to her skill and to her themes of movement, isolation, intellectual hunger, and longing for connection.”

    —Nancy Pagh, author of No Sweeter Fat


    Carolyne Wright has published nine books and chapbooks of poetry, a collection of essays, and four volumes of translations from Spanish and Bengali. Her latest book is Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene (Turning Point Books, 2011), featuring the post-modern alter-ego, Eulene. An earlier collection, Seasons of Mangoes and Brainfire (Carnegie Mellon UP / EWU Books, 2nd edition 2005), won the Blue Lynx Prize and American Book Award. Wright’s investigative memoir of her experiences in Chile on a Fulbright Study Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende, The Road to Isla Negra, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Crossing Boundaries Award from International Quarterly. Wright spent four years on Indo-U.S. Subcommission and Fulbright Senior Research fellowships in Kolkata, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh, collecting and translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers for an anthology in progress, A Bouquet of Roses on the Burning Ground, which received a Witter Bynner Foundation Grant and an NEA Fellowship in Translation, as well as a Fellowship from the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. A Seattle native who studied with Elizabeth Bishop and Richard Hugo, Wright has been a visiting writer at colleges, universities, schools, and conferences around the country. She moved back to Seattle in 2005, and teaches for the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Program. A poem of hers appeared in The Best American Poetry 2009 (ed. David Wagoner) and The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses (2010). 

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