Axe in Blossom
Last Poems & Fragments
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
Axe in Blossom
Pre-order Now for £8.10
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Franz Wright
About this listen
“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.
Critic reviews
“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!
No reviews yet