spuytenduyvil

While most contemporary New York School poetry seems aimed at like-minded, coterie hipsters, Wright’s poems ostensibly are directed (as were Shakespeare’s sonnets) to a single ear.

                        Jim Feast in Rain Taxi

 

THIS IS A GREAT BOOK! Jeff Wright has become the first human being to win the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont. Take that, Equines! He did it the poet’s way—he crowned himself with sonnets, and gifted them to the world. Reciprocate his generosity by reading with your whole body. And they’re off!

                         Bob Holman

 

Wright’s had always a surrealistic edge to his work combined with a clarity that puts him in a league all his own.

                         Hal Sirowitz

 

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s work is dazzling, befuddling, up and down, and impossible to crown, though he writes in the impossible form of the shattered Corona. His work is full of good humor, but it is also as wildly rumbling as the elephant in mourning. As archaeologists find new skulls, so Wright discovers impossible anamorphosis of poetry. The work seems to come out of Ted Berrigan’s sonnet sequences, then suddenly it seems to veer into all possible sequences, a globalism which is the point. Not to like these works is like rejecting New Orleans because it is full of pleasure. Everything seems to be packed in here, even oneself. But the self that you discover is strange and seems like nothing you had guessed as yourself before. We have just stepped on Mars by mechanics; Wright has been there for a long time by human means and refusing to clean up. “Between the mess and the message” and the mesa and the mismatch, there he lies.

                         David Shapiro