One With Others
“In 1969, a Tennessean known as ‘Sweet Willie Wine’ led a small group of African-American men on a ‘walk against fear’ through smalltown Arkansas. This event grounds Wright’s most recent blending of poetry and investigative journalism. A tribute to Wright’s mentor ‘V’—an autodidact, activist, and bourbon-swilling mother of eight, whose support for the march (‘I would have followed Sweet Willie Wine into hell’) made her ‘a disaffiliated member of her race’—the book probes the limits and intersections of the personal and the political.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The ‘poetry’ of these books lies partly in the fuguelike structure of their information, contrapuntal patterns worthy of Bach.”
—Dan Chiasson
“Thankfully, we have writers like C.D. Wright to helps us see the world for both what it is and what it could be, and the account of a woman like V to let us know the great courage that is available to us all.”
—Jessica Jacobs