Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments

Axe in Blossom: Last Poems & Fragments

Wright, Franz

Hardcover

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $28.00

ISBN10: 0307962059
ISBN13: 9780307962058
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: Jul 7 2026
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.83
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.01 Depth: 8.51
Language: English
The Pulitzer Prize winner's final written work: poems of penetrating acceptance and humor, whose soul-sweeping gaze encompasses his own autobiography and the broken world he nonetheless gives thanks for

His hands strip poetry to its nub. --Los Angeles Times

Reading [Wright] is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. . . . The shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking. --Chicago Tribune

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.

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