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.

Cover photo by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright