Mountain Home-born poet C.D. Wright’s new book, “One with Others” gets the feature review spot in this week’s New Yorker (you have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing). The book, which Bernard Reed reviewed in the Times here, is about the four-day March Against Fear from West Memphis to Little Rock that a group of black men staged in 1969.
From the New Yorker:
Anyone writing about this subject quickly runs into some representational problems. The era has been so memorably captured in documentaries that, even when you imagine it, you end up drifting into documentary conventions. It turns out that the literary genre least likely to get in the way of this story is poetry, which, despite its reputation for gilt and taffeta, comfortably veers close to “documentary” conventions. It comes especially close in Wright’s angular strain of postmodern poetry, which draws on refractive techniques now a hundred years old: collage, extensive quotation, multiplicity of voice and tone, found material, and, often, a non-authorial, disinterested stance. “One with Others” represents Wright’s most audacious experiment yet in loading up lyric with evidentiary fact.