‘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.
