{"product_id":"the-beforelife-isbn-9780375709432","title":"The Beforelife","description":"In this stunning collection, Franz Wright chronicles the journey back from a place of isolation and wordlessness. After a period when it seemed certain he would never write poetry again, he speaks with bracing clarity about the twilit world that lies between madness and sanity, addiction and recovery. Wright negotiates the precarious transition from illness to health in a state of skeptical rapture, discovering along the way the exhilaration of love--both divine and human--and finding that even the most battered consciousness can be good company.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhether he is writing about his regret for the abortion of a child, describing the mechanics of slander (\"I can just hear them  on the telephone and keening  all their kissy little knives\"), or composing an ironic ode to himself (\"To a Blossoming Nut Case\"), Wright's poems are exquisitely precise. Charles Simic has characterized him as a poetic miniaturist, whose \"secret ambition is to write an epic on the inside of a matchbook cover.\" Time and again, Wright turns on a dime in a few brief lines, exposing the dark comedy and poignancy of his heightened perception.  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is one of the poems from the collection:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDescription of Her Eyes\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo teaspoonfuls,\u003cbr\u003eand my mind goes\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eeveryone can kiss my ass now\u003c\/i\u003e--\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethen it's changed,\u003cbr\u003eI change my mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEyes so sad, and infinitely kind.\"This luminous, courageous book is about all of us--about our daily torment and redemption, which we dare not speak even to our souls. But Wright has done so.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Olga Broumas, author of \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eRave: Poems, 1975-1999\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"These poems break me; they're like jewels shaped by blunt, ruined fingers--miraculous gifts. At any one time only a handful of genuine poets reside on the planet. I consider Franz Wright to be one of these, and I'm grateful that we have him among us.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---Denis Johnson\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Writers who are genuinely original, who beat their own path, make up a kind of visionary company, to which Franz Wright, with this new book, must clearly be admitted.  These poems seem haunted by their own dark imaginings, yet at surprising moments turn all of a sudden humorous, if mordantly so. Reading them will train readers to stay alert for whatever devastating surprises may be coming up next.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---Donald Justice\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In a language waking from delirium, these astonishing poems offer---in their spare, raw, and pure lyric clarity---the prayers of madness and the light of its aftermath. Wright is a poet apart in his gifts and his courage.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e---Carolyn Forche\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Intriguing and always accessible, with no 'irrelevant \/ lies,' this book will expand the audience for poetry by showing readers that, in spite of stunning obstacles, it is always 'possible to live.'\"\u003cbr\u003e--\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"In these short meditations of anguish and hope, Wright achieves the clarity of 'seeing,' and a hard-won wisdom as well.\"--\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\" 'Beforelife': the word is so striking that the halting suspence of a double-crostic puzzle overhangs the book, as each poem individually withholds final definition. These poems brilliantly duplicate the willfulness and self-spite of the drinker's impulse ... they're mostly miniatures, the beginnings or endings of Hopperesque stories with a European gloss, their diction mixing mid-American colloquial speech and turns that evoke out-of-context translations.\"--Elizabeth Macklin, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003eFranz Wright, the son of the poet James Wright, was born in Vienna in 1953 and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. His most recent works include \u003ci\u003eIll Lit: Selected \u0026amp; New Poems\u003c\/i\u003e and an expanded edition of translations entitled \u003ci\u003eThe Unknown Rilke\u003c\/i\u003e. He has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN\/Voelcker Award for Poetry, among other honors. He lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Elizabeth.\"Empty Cathedral\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere’s this pew\u003cbr\u003eat the back\u003cbr\u003ethat’s been\u003cbr\u003ewaiting\u003cbr\u003efor you\u003cbr\u003eall your life, like your death bed.\u003cbr\u003eChrist Criminal\u003cbr\u003ehanging\u003cbr\u003eabove, eyes and mouth\u003cbr\u003eclosed suggesting\u003cbr\u003ebefore you too enter\u003cbr\u003ethe third person, light\u003cbr\u003eone candle\u003cbr\u003efor the here,\u003cbr\u003ewill you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--------------------------------------------------------------------\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Thanks Prayer at the Cove\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA year ago today\u003cbr\u003eI was unable to speak\u003cbr\u003eone syntactically coherent\u003cbr\u003ethought let alone write it down: today\u003cbr\u003ein this dear and absurdly allegorical place\u003cbr\u003eby your grace\u003cbr\u003eI am here\u003cbr\u003eand not in that graveyard, its skyline\u003cbr\u003evisible now from the November leaflessness\u003cbr\u003eand I am here to say\u003cbr\u003eit's 5 o'clock, too late to write more\u003cbr\u003e(especially for the one whose eyes\u003cbr\u003eare starting to get dark), the single\u003cbr\u003edispirited swan out on the windless brown\u003cbr\u003etransparent floor floating\u003cbr\u003egradually backward\u003cbr\u003eblackward\u003cbr\u003eno this is what I still\u003cbr\u003ecan see, white\u003cbr\u003eas a joint in a box of little cigars-\u003cbr\u003eand where is the mate\u003cbr\u003eLord, it is almost winter in the year\u003cbr\u003e2000 and now I look up to find five\u003cbr\u003epractically unseeable mallards at my feet\u003cbr\u003ethey have crossed\u003cbr\u003enearly standing on earth they're so close\u003cbr\u003elooking up to me\u003cbr\u003efor bread-\u003cbr\u003ethat's what my eyes of flesh see (barely)\u003cbr\u003ebut what I wished to say\u003cbr\u003eis this, listen:\u003cbr\u003ea year ago today\u003cbr\u003eI found myself riding the subway psychotic\u003cbr\u003e(I wasn't depressed, I wanted to rip my face off)\u003cbr\u003eunable to write what I thought, which was nothing\u003cbr\u003ethough I tried though I finally stopped trying and\u003cbr\u003elooked up\u003cbr\u003eat the face of the man\u003cbr\u003edirectly across from me, and it began\u003cbr\u003eto melt before my eyes\u003cbr\u003eand in an instant it was young again\u003cbr\u003ethe face he must have had\u003cbr\u003eonce when he was five\u003cbr\u003eand in an instant it happened again only this\u003cbr\u003etime\u003cbr\u003eit changed to the face of his elderly\u003cbr\u003ecorpse and back in time\u003cbr\u003eit changed\u003cbr\u003eto his face at our present\u003cbr\u003emoment of time's flowing and then\u003cbr\u003eas if transparently\u003cbr\u003esuperimposed I saw them all at once\u003cbr\u003eOK I was insane but how insane\u003cbr\u003ecan someone be I thought, I did not\u003cbr\u003eknow you then\u003cbr\u003eI didn't know you were there God\u003cbr\u003e(that's what we call you, grunt grunt)\u003cbr\u003eas you are at every moment\u003cbr\u003eeverywhere of what we call\u003cbr\u003ethe future and the past\u003cbr\u003eAnd then I tried once more\u003cbr\u003eexperimentally\u003cbr\u003eI focused\u003cbr\u003eon another's face, no need to describe it\u003cbr\u003ethere is only one\u003cbr\u003eunderneath\u003cbr\u003ethese scary and extremely\u003cbr\u003erealistic rubber masks\u003cbr\u003eand there is as I also know now\u003cbr\u003eby your grace one\u003cbr\u003eand only one person on earth\u003cbr\u003ebeneath a certain depth\u003cbr\u003ethe terror and the love\u003cbr\u003eare one, like hunger, same\u003cbr\u003ein everyone\u003cbr\u003eand it happened again, das Unglück geschah\u003cbr\u003eyou might say nur mir allein it happened\u003cbr\u003eno matter who I looked at\u003cbr\u003efor maybe five minutes long enough\u003cbr\u003elong enough\u003cbr\u003ethis secret trinity\u003cbr\u003eI saw, the others\u003cbr\u003ewill say I am making it up\u003cbr\u003eas if that mattered\u003cbr\u003eLord,\u003cbr\u003eI make up nothing\u003cbr\u003enot one word.","brand":"Knopf","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305453801701,"sku":"NP9780375709432","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375709432.jpg?v=1767738299","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-beforelife-isbn-9780375709432","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}