Publisher Description

C. D. Wright takes her title from a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before having had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.Cooling Time is a new type of book, an unruly vigil that is an interconnected memoir-poem-essay about contemporary American poetry. Ever focused on possibilities, Wright demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives," and thereby defines the terms by which poets can chart their own course.These are some of the things I have touched in my life that are forbidden: paintings behind velvet ropes, electric fencing, a vault in an office, gun in a drawer, my brother's folding money, the poet's anus, the black holes in his heart-where his life went out of him.Tell me, what is the long stretch of road for if not to sort out the reasons why we are here and why we do what we do, from why we are not in the other lane doing what others do.Poetry is like food remarked one of my first teachers, freeing me to dislike Rocky Mountain Oysters and Robert Lowell. The menu is vast, the list of things I don't want in my mouth relatively short.C.D. Wright, author of nine books of poetry, teaches at Brown University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with poet Forrest Gander.

Author Biography

C.D. Wright (1949-2016) taught at Brown University for decades and published over a dozen works of poetry and prose, including One With Others, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was nominated for a National Book Award; One Big Self: An Investigation; and Rising Falling Hovering. Among her many honors are the Griffin International Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Promotional

· display at key trade and academic conferences · advance copies to key booksellers · full page in inhouse catalog · promotion on Press website · C.D. is invited to read all over the country. We'll keep pace and make sure her books are there.

Description for Sales People

C.D. Wright is one of the country's "watched" poets This is C.D.'s first book of prose--unruly and undeniably brilliant. Title refers to a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. A bit memoir, a bit poetics, a tad manifesto, and an ongoing argument with books. It is unlike anything out there. As she writes: "To see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us--which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced."

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