One with Others: [a little book of her days] - Hardcover

Wright, C. D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556593244 ISBN 13: 9781556593246

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2010

Synopsis

Poetry. Investigative journalism is the poet's realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the Civil Rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories—especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow—with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.

About this title

About the Author:

C.D. Wright is the author of a dozen collections of poetry and prose. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Wright is a professor of English at Brown University and lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

From Publishers Weekly:

In 1969, a Tennessean known as "Sweet Willie Wine" led a small group of African-American men on a "walk against fear" through small-town Arkansas. This event grounds Wright's most recent blending of poetry and investigative journalism. A tribute to Wright's mentor--an autodidact, activist, and bourbon-swilling mother of eight, whose support for the march ("I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell") made her "a disaffiliated member of her race"--the book probes the limits and intersections of the personal and the political. Wright intersperses descriptions of the Arkansas landscape; her own journey researching; transcriptions from V, her family, and others who experienced the events of that violent summer; lists of prices ("the only sure thing in those days"); the weather ("temperatures in the 90s even after a shower"), newspaper headlines; and personal memories. Through juxtaposition and repetition, she weaves a compelling, disturbing, and often beautiful tapestry that at once questions the ability of language to get at the complicated truth of history ("because the warp is everywhere"), and underscores the ethical imperative to try. As Wright learns from V, "To act, just to act. That was the glorious thing."
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About this edition

• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1556593244
• ISBN 13: 9781556593246
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 160