Box

Description

A powerful new collection from an acclaimed, award-winning poetWith nine previously published collections of poetry, Robert Wrigley has become one of his generation’s most accomplished poets, renowned for his irony, power, and lucid style and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses.
Wrigley’s tenth collection, Box, is a book of poems obsessed with human containment, with the way people are contained or confined—by time, mortality, technology, identity, culture, and history—in almost everything they are and everything they do. Even the body, even the poem itself, is in this regard a kind of self-containing crate, in which the human being, perhaps the human spirit, is shipped into the world at large. But Box is also a book obsessed with escape from containment, and escape comes from dreams, from deep awareness, from contemplation, from love, and above all, as Wallace Stevens insisted, from “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” The poems in Box aim to do nothing less than “help people live their lives,” as Stevens put it. “Quietly enlightening . . . Box thoughtfully considers how human beings, relationships, and the physical world are constrained by time, mortality, and other invisible forces . . . Wrigley meditates on the fragility and strength of nature; the search for transcendence and connection; the objects people keep and pass on; and how various landscapes can trap or inspire the soul.”
– The Washington Post
 “These poems are masterful in how they navigate time, molding memory into new understanding.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch Robert Wrigley’s previous collections of poetry include Anatomy of Melancholy (2013), winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award; Beautiful Country (2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (2006); Lives of the Animals (2003), winner of The Poet’s Prize; and Reign of Snakes (1999), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He lives with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes, in the woods near Moscow, Idaho. US