Review by Booklist Review
Major's spare, expertly constructed poems are like ladders luring readers away from the heavily trod, shadowy ground up into clear air, an ascent that places all the quick changes of the heart and mind into sharp perspective. But these gleaming word-ladders lead down, too, out of the thin air of cliche s and tired assumptions, affectation and glibness, back to the earth and the body, to pain and rapture. Selected poems from nine previous volumes, including the strikingly inventive The Syncopated Cakewalk (1974), comprise the first half of this vital volume; the second presents new and previously unpublished works. Witty, angry, sensual, and blue, Major writes in a variety of personae, travels back and forth in time, and circles the globe from the South Side of Chicago to the French countryside, from Mali to Mexico. Appreciation for this multitalented writer is on the rise. In addition to this treasury of poems, Major's first novel, All-Night Visitors, has finally been published in full (see p. 567). --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Expertly elliptical phrasings, and an uncounterfeitable, generous feel for real people, bodies and places, have lately made Wright one of America's oddest, best and most appealing poets. Her tenth book consists of a single long poem whose sentences, segments and prose-blocks weave loosely around and about, and grow out of, a road trip through the rural South. Clipped twangs, lyrical "goblets of magnolialight," and recurrent, mysterious, semi-allegorical figures like "the snakeman" and "the boneman" share space with place names, lexicographies, exhortations and wacky graffiti ("God is Louise"). Wright alternates private references with clear allusions, as when images of eye enucleations and glass eyes culminate in a flurry of bits from King Lear. Deepstep teems with wry, rich sentences no one else could have written: "I left my chicory-blue swimsuit back at the motel where the baseball team cannonballed us out of the pool." She leaps exhilaratingly among verbal registersfrom "kenatoprosthesis" to "trailer skirt," from "Arkansas toe" and "pinball" to "Ultima Thule." And she loves double meanings"Morning glories. What's yours." Her uncharacteristically extroverted, ethnographic project also shows her sense of humor"Her Aunt Flo said she hadn't had any in so long she'd done growed back together." In sorting these glittering, interlocking fragments of "self-conscious Southern poetry, preposterous as a wedding dress," some readers will wish Wright had included notes, or explained her extensive back story; but no one will need more information to cherish Wright's latest "once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning." (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Major is perhaps best known for his fiction (see All-Night Visitors, listed above), but he has been writing poetry for years. This, however, is his first collection in a decade. The unlikely images don't always work, but when they do, "his poetry is excellent." (LJ 10/1/98) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This Arkansas-born Brown professor has written numerous books of verse and has also collaborated on multimedia exhibits about her native state, a type of experience that shows in this unusual verse novel, an unholy marriage of Kerouac's bop prosody and Flannery O'Connor's southern gothic sensibility. Stylistically, it also brings to mind Anne Carson's similarly collage-like verse novel, Autobiography of Red, though Wright draws not on classical literature, but on a wild mix of pop lyrics, down-home imagery, readings on optics, and just about anything that plunks into consciousness. Framed as a car ride through the South, Wright visits only places of iconic significance or sonorous glee, from Poetry, Georgia, to Hamlet, N.C. (birthplace of John Coltrane). Lots of sass-talk punctuates the journey (""Shit. I burned the shit out of my shit-eating tongue""), and typography provides at least some visual variation in this self-consciously cinematic narrative. As tough-talking as much of this is, Wright indulges in moments of pathos for AIDS victims and a child blinded by Agent Orange. Careful to establish her white-trash authenticity (""Trailer living was appealing when I was seventeen""), she too often gives in to Forrest Gump--like pearls of wisdom and lame bits of anarchic humor. Wright's unique voice is all rhythm, sometimes dizzying and delightful, and sometimes simply incoherent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
