Deepstep Come Shining
“An unholy marriage of Kerouac’s bop prosody and Flannery O—Connor’s southern gothic sensibility. Stylistically, it also brings to mind Anne Carson’s similarly collage-like verse novel, Autobiography of Red, though Wright draws not on classical literature, but on a wild mix of pop lyrics, down-home imagery, readings on optics, and just about anything else that plunks into consciousness.” —Kirkus Review
“To me, it signals one of the rare publications where a writer simultaneously "goes native" and "stays home" (Zora Neale Hurston's work is a seminal early example in this style). Denying her ties to neither the eccentricities of the rural South (which I'm afraid too many reviewers will focus almost exclusively on) nor academic/institutional life (the author is, after all, a professor at Brown University, a Guggenheim and NEA fellow, and former State Poet of Rhode Island), Wright melds these disparate voices, these fragments of her own polysubjectivity, into one of the most unique volumes of investigative, observational poetics to have been published in a very long time.” —Mark Nowak
“Expertly elliptical phrasings, and an uncounterfeitable, generous feel for real people, bodies and places, have lately made Wright one of America's oddest, best and most appealing poets.”
—Publishers Weekly