Overview

"Bledsoe is an extended narrative poem that centers on a mute Appalachian man named Durant Bledsoe. Specifically, the poem takes place in the mountains of Yancey County, North Carolina, in an early part of the 20th century. Durant Bledsoe’s mother is dying with a brain tumor and he must take care of her, all the while coming to terms with the fact that she, in her suffering, has asked him to take her life. The book focuses much on landscape and on Bledsoe’s complex psychology and perceptions of the world, specifically as they apply to culture, family, religion, and identity. ""Rarely has a contemporary poetic voice achieved the incantatory with such skill, echoes of Cormac McCarthy's word-hoard pulsing throughout!""—Kathryn Stripling Byer “Sometimes a prayer, sometimes a scream, sometimes a folksong, the poem is a narrative of care giving, devotion, violence, and love. You will not soon forget it.”—Robert Morgan"

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9781680033649

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Reviews

“Bledsoe reads like a poem by Cormac McCarthy. In startling, vivid lyrics, Bledsoe unfolds as an intense drama of affliction and the mystery of consciousness and time, of curse and exorcism, of nightmare and the rejuvenating power of nature cycles of growth and decay. Wright has created his own haunted world, with different voice, interior voices. Sometimes a prayer, sometimes a scream, sometimes a folksong, the poem is a narrative of care giving, devotion, violence, and love. You will not soon forget it.”—Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Terroir  “William Wright’s haunting new volume, Bledsoe is a book-length paean-lament, chiseled into thirty-seven sections of truncated supple couplets. It is the odyssey of Durant Bledsoe, a mute Appalachian savant-seer, ultimately and literally orphaned, but also remanded to wander untended in the weir of his own preternatural place. Wright’s language, difficult to dub because it is so inspired, comes from that other inscrutable place as well—by turns like gentle rain, but more often like Gatling gun fire, a fusillade of linguistic and aural sophisticated that is truly fascinating. The entire poem is fever dream-like, mythic, yet girded by a searing narrative rooted in, of all places, Yancey County, North Carolina—which rarifies this luminous book all the more.”—Joseph Bathanti, author of Land of Amnesia and Restoring Sacred Act  “William Wright’s Bledsoe has the ambition of an extended narrative reminiscent of the down-home, home-sung lyrics of Claudia Emerson’s Pinion. Bledsoe’s style, however, is more sparse and hungry, the words snapping with the crispness of a cold apple bitten into. This ‘unearthed gospel’ of sorrow and loss in the rural south is seething with life and memorable language, sculpting a landscape where ‘insects chisel the night to a point,’ which is exactly what Wright does, making radiance of darkness and finding dignity in affliction.”—R. T. Smith, Editor of Shenandoah “Through language would tight as baling wire, Wright conjures Bledsoe out of the backwoods and into our world where he lodges like a burr in our imagination. Rarely has a contemporary poetic voice achieved the incantatory with such skill, echoes of Cormac McCarthy’s word-hoard pulsing throughout! Wright’s couplets stride, stagger, and rage, burning Bledsoe’s inner and outer landscape like a cattle brand into our memory. I can imagine a medieval skald or jongleur singing this poem around a fire, his listeners’ faces rapt with listening, as any reader of Bledsoe will be, lost in the spell by this powerful poem.”—Kathryn Stripling Byer, author of Coming to Rest and Wildwood Flower 

"""Bledsoe reads like a poem by Cormac McCarthy. In startling, vivid lyrics, Bledsoe unfolds as an intense drama of affliction and the mystery of consciousness and time, of curse and exorcism, of nightmare and the rejuvenating power of nature cycles of growth and decay. Wright has created his own haunted world, with different voice, interior voices. Sometimes a prayer, sometimes a scream, sometimes a folksong, the poem is a narrative of care giving, devotion, violence, and love. You will not soon forget it."" --Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek and Terroir ""William Wright's haunting new volume, Bledsoe is a book-length paean-lament, chiseled into thirty-seven sections of truncated supple couplets. It is the odyssey of Durant Bledsoe, a mute Appalachian savant-seer, ultimately and literally orphaned, but also remanded to wander untended in the weir of his own preternatural place. Wright's language, difficult to dub because it is so inspired, comes from that other inscrutable place as well--by turns like gentle rain, but more often like Gatling gun fire, a fusillade of linguistic and aural sophisticated that is truly fascinating. The entire poem is fever dream-like, mythic, yet girded by a searing narrative rooted in, of all places, Yancey County, North Carolina--which rarifies this luminous book all the more."" --Joseph Bathanti, author of Land of Amnesia and Restoring Sacred Act"

Author Information

William Wright is author or editor of over twenty nationally published books, with several forthcoming. Most recently, Wright published Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems with Mercer University Press in 2021. Wright has been named the Georgia Author of the Year, the Georgia Editor of the Year, and won the Terrain.org Grand Prize. Wright was named Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in 2016 and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory from 2017–2020. Currently, he’s working on a novel, a collection of essays, and a volume of poetry.

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