C.D. Wright is one of America's leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, "C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature."

Rising, Falling, Hoveringis a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. "We are running on Aztec time,"she writes, "fifth and final cycle."

In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright's language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or

5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.

Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the corpses

in the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.

Does the war never end. Is this the war of all against all.

Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, the

evangelicals. . .

C.D. Wright, author of twelve collections of poetry and prose, is a professor of English at Brown University and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005. She lives outside Providence, Rhode Island.

"In her first collection of new lyric poems since 2003, Wright braids some of her most personal and intimate poetry to date with an extended meditation on the consequences of America's contemporary stance toward other countries. Short, elliptical lyrics, featuring Wright's trademark repetition of lines and sharp wit, which interrogate their own speaker and a companion ('She is not really hearing what he's really saying') flank the two-part title piece, a long poem that is a travelogue of a trip to Mexico at the beginning of the current war in Iraq. Everywhere the shell-shocked speaker goes, she finds people 'mesmerized// by the new media-borne war,' while she feels 'Ashamed of her solace in being here' because, now more than ever, 'to be ashamed is to be American.' As the lines blur between tourism and empire, and as images and impressions accrue ('Whole new breed of dog born in every warren'), the poem's speaker also reflects on the safety and precariousness of her own family. This book displays a new level of social and personal consciousness for Wright (One Big Self), who characterizes the powerful ambivalence that now accompanies life in America, where injustice may be the price of freedom, and where 'poetry/ doesn't/ protect/ you/ anymore.'" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

C.D. Wright, a Professor of English at Brown University, is the author of ten books of poetry, as well as several collaborative works with photographer Deborah Luster, most recently One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana. She has earned fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations, and is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in Rhode Island.