The Beforelife

Rating:
Summary: affect or content?
Review: As I read through this book I had the growing impression that the author was more concerned with his role as poet than he was in his poems. Too often we're given a "mood" line or gesture and not something that grows out of the poem itself, but the mood wears thin and so does the role.

Rating:
Summary: too little apparent effort
Review: Just because someone poetically bares his soul about addiction and recovery does not ipso facto mean the expression of baring is of poetic value. To be sure, there are some striking phrases, and Wright's ability to "turn on a dime" as the jacket states is evident. But so much of this stuff seems as though it never got past the first draft, as though pieces of conversation were stenographed, cut up and put on the page to look like poetry rather than like prosaic ordinaria.

Rating:
Summary: Scalpel on a Napkin
Review: Whispered and etched, this book, this swarm of white space razored by words, this pill of dry and dead truth and black stars hanging in the far parts of the mind, which quietly explode (like an echo of an explosion) when you least expect them to, is one of the most urgent books of poetry I've read in several years. The occasional primordial club bashing the back of one's skull, the self-deprecating humor ("you will find me . . . . at the motherless sky.com"), the deeply earned authority to say with complete conviction "Why isn't Jesus's face ever described?/ Because/ in heaven unlike earth/ it doesn't make a difference/ what one looks like/ I suppose" This is a courageous and startling book of poems, a new chapter, in fact, in American Poetry.