The complete trilogy following the double life of a young black man in mid-twentieth-century New York: "Reading Wright is a steep, stinging pleasure." —Dwight Garner, The New York TimesIn this incisive, satirical collection of three classic American novels by Charles Wright—hailed by the New York Times as "malevolent, bitter, glittering"—a young black intellectual from the South struggles to make it in New York City. This special compilation includ...

Almost thirty years ago, Charles Wright (who teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry) began a poetic project of astonishing scope--a series of three trilogies. The first trilogy was collected in Country Music, the second in The World of the Ten Thousand Things, and the third began with Chickamauga and continued with Black Zodiac. Appalachia is the last bo...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle AwardBlack Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal vers...

The World of Ten Thousand Things gathers The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and a new group of poems, "Xionia," into one volume, allowing us to see Wright's work of the past decade as, in essence, one long poem, a meditation on self, history, and the metaphysical that is among the most ambitious and resonant creations in contemporary American poetry.

A compilation of powerful and moving poems from early in the poet's career.Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry, Country Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977. From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim a...

Negative Blue is the culmination of the cycle that won Wright the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.Time will append us like suit coats left out overnightOn a deck chair, loose change dead weight in the right pocket,Silk handkerchief limp with dew,sleeves in a slow dance with the wind.And love will kill us--Love, and the winds from under the earththat grin...

The sun has set behind the Blue Ridge,And evening with its blotting paperlifts off the light.Shadowy yards. Moon through the white pines--"Landscape with Missing Overtones"Never has Charles Wright's vision been more closely aligned with the work of the ancient Chinese painters and writers who inform his poetry than in his newest collection. Wright's short lyrics, in Charles Simic's words, "achieve a level of eloquence w...

The selected works of one of our finest American poetsThe thread that dangles usbetween a dark and a darker dark,Is luminous, sure, but smooth sided.Don't touch it here, and don't touch it there.Don't touch it, in fact, anywhere—Let it dangle and hold us hard, let it flash and swing.—from "Scar Tissue"Over the course of his work—more than twenty books in total—Char...

Sestets is the nineteenth book from one of the country's most acclaimed poets, a masterpiece of formal rigor and a profound meditation on nature and mortality. It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and...

After the end of something, there comes another end,This one behind you, and far away.Only a lifetime can get you to it,and then just barely.Littlefoot, the eighteenth book from one of this country's most acclaimed poets, is an extended meditation on mortality, on the narrator's search of the skies for a road map and for last instructions on "the other side of my own death." Following the course of one year, the poet's seventieth, we witness the seasons...

Hard to imagine that no one counts,that only things endure.Unlike the seasons, our shirts don't shed,Whatever we see does not see us,however hard we look,The rain in its silver earrings against the oak trunks,The rain in its second skin.--from "Scar Tissue II"In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality--"thing is not an image"--but also r...

Award-winning French author shares the biography and spiritual journey of Cistercian abbot Dom André Louf.Based on a wide variety of interviews, printed sources, and Dom André Louf’s spiritual journal, The Way of the Heart narrates Louf’s spiritual journey from his childhood in Flanders through his becoming a monk in a Cistercian monastery, his ten years of retirement as a hermit in a Benedictine monastery in the south of France, and his d...