Carolyne Wright’s poems connect the personal and political and walk the difficult edge of poetic lyricism and social engagement. They are poems that search for “a language between us” in which personal loss becomes a metaphor for an injured and debilitating world where political violence and conflict keep us from fulfilling ourselves in meaningful ways. For her, our lives are often drifting and “unfinished” in this world of divisions. Yet while she refuses to pretend that lives of great suffering and sorrow don’t exist and aren’t costly, she often enacts those complex, particular moments when the oversimplifications of political ideologies run up against the strange power of our individual lives.
—Robert Cording
The language of Carolyne Wright’s poems is as rich, diverse, and bursting with life as the natural world of the coastal Northwest she calls home; but her home is the world, much of which she has traveled. Her poems engage that larger world and the lives of its citizens, their history, turmoil, and jeopardy. Hers is a poetry both of celebration and of sober courage.
—David Axelrod
Like the first line in the title poem, the haunting poems in Carolyne Wright’s wide-ranging collection won’t let us go. Beginning with a new sequence of deeply moving elegies about her mute sister, whose presence was kept a secret, these poems grab hold, taking us back through the decades. But this isn’t a nostalgic journey; rather, Wright’s subjects range from Luna moths to César Vallejo. Deftly employing witty word play in a variety of forms—from acrostics to ghazals to pantoums—this collection interweaves voices and cultures, vividly showing “this dream the world” and reminding us of poetry’s role in bearing witness to what can’t, but must, be spoken.
—Holly J. Hughes
