Transfigurations

Wright’s collected work reveals a writer of serious intellectual depth, whose humanistic blend of multilingualism, African cosmology, and meditations on history, shows us how to think in a time marked by confusion and decline. Future scholars will marvel at how such poetry was championed and given its due when everywhere the subtle insights of the arts and humanities are under attack. This will be testament to both Wright’s vision and the inspired community that labours to read, publish and preserve it for a hopeful future -- Jay Bernard, author of <i> Surge </i> A substantial collection of work. [Wright’s] forcefully musical rhythms drive even poems of everyday experience—such as waiting outside church on a warm night—to a pleasingly contradictory transport. And the later, meditative poems are bound to the world by their attention to the sensual within the spiritual * The New Yorker * One of the most innovative and visionary poets in the American and African-American traditions... [Transfigurations] synthesises Wright's philosophical and transcultural explorations with a dazzling and indelible linguistic music -- John Keene, author of <i> Counternarratives </i> Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet… beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains -- John Hollander * The New York Times * An astonishing New World epic…of human transfiguration and transformation, of nothing less than the great work of art that is ‘our life among ourselves’ -- Steven Meyer * Boston Review *