C.D. Wright Wins Lenore Marshall Award

The Academy of American Poets have announced that C.D. Wright has won this year's Lenore Marshall Award, which awards $25, 000 for the year's most outstanding book of poetry.

From the Academy website:

About Wright's winning book, judge Martha Ronk remarked:

"'Nothing is not integral.' This phrase near the end of C.D. Wright's One With Others characterizes both the book itself and a reader's immersion in it. Navigation between document and lyric forms the fabric of this passionate, funny, and elegiac book, a personal account of her mentor, 'V,' mad for T.S. Eliot and bourbon and cigarettes and justice, who, as the lone white woman, joins the protest walk led by 'Sweet Willie Wine' through towns in the Arkansas delta, 1969."

"Wright's graceful and startling ability to move seamlessly from the elegant to the down-to-earth, from racial history to the cost of a head of lettuce, and from her words to the words of others creates an all-encompassing world including both V's feisty heroism—'Just to act, was the glorious thing'—and 'the long-lingering olfaction of home, whether from the faint cut of walnuts spoiled in the grass or a sour work shirt on a rotted railing'. Wright describes V as a mind on fire; as readers we witness this throughout: 'Harry says, What we really want from our time on this planet, is that which is not this, we want the ethical this; we want to feel and transmit."