Being son of the eminent James Wright, Franz has a lot looming over him. He responds to his world by fragmenting it into absolute terseness, collecting the shards of feeling & experience in a manner almost venomous but so tender. He writes with blindingly crisp ellipticism & manipulation of signifier & signified, traveling at speeds twice as fast as an omitted comma.

I've been following Wright's career for years and find his compelling work burrows into the heart of the self--the mind and heart that speaks to itself--like no other poet. His work is heartbreaking as well as desperately funny. And his ability to hauntingly capture a state of mind using a few scattered images is frightening and magical. No poet since Frank Stanford has startled and excited me this much. I will read every poem of his I can get my hands on.

This poetry is the art of understatement; it is not the rock crashing into the water, but the rings that rock gives off.

For 25 years, as translator of Rilke & Char, and as the producer of half-a-dozen honest and unsparing collections, Franz Wright has written dispatches from 3 a.m., many of which will split your skull.

These are not the image-polishing cutsey poems of MFA-America. They are the hard effort of a mature professional, a man who has lived poetry since birth and handed everything over to it. Wright stares at the black dog all night long; the effort, and wisdom, of this work is rarely encountered in our Edge City world. Rorschach Test is his best book: lucid, reflective, by turns sardonic, always honest beyond measure.

Don't buy this book if your idea of poetry is small elaborations on obvious things, artfully done; this is a book that tries to understand why men and women breathe, and why that is so hard.

In the very fine introduction to this book, Wright draws Rilke parallel to a comment about Rimbaud: "(he) was neither a seer or a prophet nor a god: he was a poet, *that is enough*." Rilke is one of the West's major poets, no matter how far back in time you go. Period. And if you think you know the poet, but you haven't read these poems, these clear & wise translations... You don't know Rilke.

I have no idea why this book is not better known. I myself was turned onto it by the provocative author Jonathan Carroll, in one of his fine novels. Yes, this contains some fragmentary, unfinished poems Rilke was working on during difficult periods of his life. Yes, some are reflections on Biblical characters. But they transcend the subject the same as Rilke transcends most other poets' ideas of poetry - where it can go, where it can take you, both as reader and as writer. Rilke exemplified, intentionally or not, a new vision of human consciousness, where it fits in relation to everything else. In Rilke, as with most great poetry (and most great art), it is not so much paying attention to his words when you read him - if poetry comes to you, it will come between the words, in the spaces you find yourself creating for it to fill, in a certain accumulation of insight and wisdom. In this, Rilke is one of the world's rare geniuses.

This edition presents mostly unpublished work completed or abandoned during the last two decades of Rilke's life. It is full of presentiments and "echoes" of his final masterwork, Duino Elegies. These rank among some of his finest, most lucid - if fragmentary - works. The honesty of Rilke's insight is sometimes stunning, heartbreaking, breath-stopping.

From the introduction: "'Life and death,' [Rilke wrote], 'at the core they are one.' Rilke was seeking the angel: not to woo him, he acknowledged - and in whose ears, if he cried out, he might not be heard at all; the angel, not the Christian angel, but a noun which has no corresponding entity in space, and yet exists for us by virtue of that noun, of language itself: exists in us, in perceiving and being perceived, in whatever impulse it was that first caused human beings to speak, to sing, to praise. The poems in [the last section of this edition] were some of Rilke's milestones, or precarious footholds and handholds on that desolate mountain of the heart..."

The first time I read this book, I thought he was a fruitcake. I thought "what *are* all these poems about, these are messed up!" but after reading them several times, they really fascinated me. Franz Wright is a gifted poet, and is very descriptive in his poetry. The book has really grown on me, it intrigues me each time I read poems from it.

As I read through this book I had the growing impression that the author was more concerned with his role as poet than he was in his poems. Too often we're given a "mood" line or gesture and not something that grows out of the poem itself, but the mood wears thin and so does the role.

Just because someone poetically bares his soul about addiction and recovery does not ipso facto mean the expression of baring is of poetic value. To be sure, there are some striking phrases, and Wright's ability to "turn on a dime" as the jacket states is evident. But so much of this stuff seems as though it never got past the first draft, as though pieces of conversation were stenographed, cut up and put on the page to look like poetry rather than like prosaic ordinaria.

Whispered and etched, this book, this swarm of white space razored by words, this pill of dry and dead truth and black stars hanging in the far parts of the mind, which quietly explode (like an echo of an explosion) when you least expect them to, is one of the most urgent books of poetry I've read in several years. The occasional primordial club bashing the back of one's skull, the self-deprecating humor ("you will find me . . . . at the motherless sky.com"), the deeply earned authority to say with complete conviction "Why isn't Jesus's face ever described?/ Because/ in heaven unlike earth/ it doesn't make a difference/ what one looks like/ I suppose" This is a courageous and startling book of poems, a new chapter, in fact, in American Poetry.