Axe in Blossom

Name: Axe in Blossom
Price: 60 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9780307962058

Last Poems & Fragments

Franz Wright

$60

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Alfred A. Knopf
11 August 2026

Literature: history & criticism

The Pulitzer Prize winner's final written work- poems of penetrating acceptance and humor, whose soul-sweeping gaze encompasses his own autobiography and the broken world he nonetheless gives thanks for

""His hands strip poetry to its nub."" -Los Angeles Times

""Reading

Wright

is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. . . . The shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking."" -Chicago Tribune

The Pulitzer Prize winner's final written work- poems of penetrating acceptance and humor, whose soul-sweeping gaze encompasses his own autobiography and the broken world he nonetheless gives thanks for

""His hands strip poetry to its nub."" -Los Angeles Times

""Reading

Wright

is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. . . . The shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking."" -Chicago Tribune

""My death is in the second drawer,"" writes Franz Wright. ""While you're standing there, would you mind getting me one?"" It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, ""I won't have written any of it. / I will have back the rights / of anonymity,"" and there is nothing left that anyone can take from him.

Wright's significant themes shine forth- radical acceptance of his own pain, mental illness, and loss; his belief in the poem's ability to rhyme with the mysteries of our worldly suffering; his nearly surreal vision of Christian grace. But most powerful for readers will be the tender force of his imagery-the ""green vesperal rain at the screen,"" the ""long Jeffersonian / $2-bill- / tinted twilight""-and, as he invites us to join him in his nicatorium, the smoking-porch of recovering addicts, the joy of finding this black-humorous voice still alive on the page to meet us.

By: Franz Wright
Imprint: Alfred A. Knopf
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 213mm, Width: 149mm, Spine: 11mm
Weight: 341g
ISBN: 9780307962058
ISBN 10: 0307962059
Pages: 160
Publication Date: 11 August 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

FRANZ WRIGHT's many poetry collections include F, God's Silence, and Wheeling Motel. His collection Walking to Martha's Vineyard was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2004, and he was also the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Fellowship, among other honors. Wright died in 2015.

Reviews for Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments

“I’ve never been the beneficiary of a burning bush or an angel’s clarion trumpet, but this is the magic I have known: a titan like Franz Wright writing—as if directly to me, today—from his vantage on the other, longer side of eternity. No one living could make these sounds, crack these jokes, no one living could see so clearly so far out ahead. It’s pulverizing. It’s what language is for. I hold Axe in Blossom like the skull of a saint.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!