Published Books
Tree Heresies (2015)
William Wright's eighth collection of poems is an expansive personal journey that includes poems about subjects as varied as a farm woman forsaken by her husband, yellow jackets, insomnia, a mountain witch, salt marshes, a ditch filled with rainwater, and even a post-apocalyptic portrait of the last person on Earth. Beginning with "Prologue," a piece that embeds a kaleidoscopic, novel-like vision of a small agricultural town and a few of its inhabitants, these poems capture the exterior world and recontextualize its many forms through a dreamlike logic, harnessing radiant imagery and strong aural texture through lines and words that stir both mind and heart. Here, Wright reveals how the most luminous forms often dwell in even the darkest subjects and images.
Night Field Anecdote (2011)
Pulling together shards of life by trusting the music of the earth that rushes over his skull, William Wright s lush poems in Night Field Anecdote look closely at the physical world and its cycles. In poem after poem, his ear becomes an oar heaving toward birdsong and the day s first wind. Written by a curious and engaged mind that gathers images and events by association, these poems are life affirming because they link the human to the larger natural world. Weaving light into rhythm and image, Wright teaches us that suffering in the world must be acknowledged and explored in order to find the pleasure, the joy that brings the hope necessary for loving.
Bledsoe (2011)
Bledsoe is an extended narrative poem that centers on a mute Appalachian man named Durant Bledsoe. Specifically, the poem takes place in the mountains of Yancey County, North Carolina, in an early part of the 20th century. Durant Bledsoe’s mother is dying with a brain tumor and he must take care of her, all the while coming to terms with the fact that she, in her suffering, has asked him to take her life. The book focuses much on landscape and on Bledsoe’s complex psychology and perceptions of the world, specifically as they apply to culture, family, religion, and identity.
"Rarely has a contemporary poetic voice achieved the incantatory with such skill, echoes of Cormac McCarthy's word-hoard pulsing throughout!"
—Kathryn Stripling Byer
“Sometimes a prayer, sometimes a scream, sometimes a folksong, the poem is a narrative of care giving, devotion, violence, and love. You will not soon forget it.”
—Robert Morgan
Dark Orchard (2005)
Winner of the 2005 Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize.
"In a world that is nearly awash in first books, William Wright's Dark Orchard stands out for its lyrical obsession with the heritage a son may have from parents and from the deeply felt landscape of childhood. . . . The language is filled with a kind of desolation and a beauty that is not quite despair, something that is better known, one suspects, by the young than by the rest of us. We should be grateful for this chance to rediscover its reach."
—Phebe Davidson
"William Wright's poems welcome us into a rich and enchanting universe. Planted in the fecund soil of his native South Carolina, this book's vision is simultaneously delicate and dangerous, touching and alarming. Woven throughout with the subtle undertones of his poetic forebears (one sees Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, and James Wright dancing in the shadows), Dark Orchard is an impressive debut volume with a depth of insight that belies the author's youth, a collection that leaves me thirsting for the next book." —Stephen Gardner