Poetry best sellers December 26, 2010-January 2, 2011

Over the holidays, C.D. Wright’s book One with Others got the Dan Chiasson treatment in the New Yorker. The review has helped put Wright’s book, at number 15 on the contemporary best seller list, a few spots ahead of Timothy Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation (number 17), the last book to be similarly Chiassoned. One with Others documents the journey of a white woman in Arkansas who joined a group of black men on a “march against fear” from Memphis to Little Rock in 1969. “It turns out that the literary genre least likely to get in the way of this story,” Chiasson writes, “is poetry, which, despite its reputation for gilt and taffeta, comfortably veers close to “documentary” conventions. It comes especially close in Wright’s angular strain of postmodern poetry, which draws on refractive techniques now a hundred years old: collage, extensive quotation, multiplicity of voice and tone, found material, and, often, a non-authorial, disinterested stance.”