Axe in Blossom
Last Poems & Fragments

Quotes

“Axe in Blossom haunts us with the almost-silence of a poet almost no longer haunted. . . . Wright brings contemporary poetry to its knees.” —Elizabeth Metzger, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Axe in Blossom is in every sense an open book, practically an open studio. We see its striking title gestate through multiple phases—in a translation, an original poem, and a collage poem made from lines by Celan, Czesław Miłosz, and Rainer Brambach. . . . Among the ‘unfinishables’ is a poem that I consider a masterpiece, probably one of Wright’s very best. Dedicated to the German poet Karl Krolow, ‘At His Desk in the Past’ was ‘transcribed from self-recorded drafts on audio,’ in 2012. It’s ‘raining in a dead language’ out the window, as Wright measures the duration of his life against various phenomena—some brief, like an infant’s fever, some ancient, like the stars. . . . Tender, hardboiled, and wisecracking.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“I’ve never been the beneficiary of a burning bush or an angel’s clarion trumpet, but this is the magic I have known: a titan like Franz Wright writing—as if directly to me, today—from his vantage on the other, longer side of eternity. No one living could make these sounds, crack these jokes, no one living could see so clearly so far out ahead. It’s pulverizing. It’s what language is for. I hold Axe in Blossom like the skull of a saint.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“Unbearably beautiful and cohesive. . . . We are in the presence of a wildly unmatchable poet. . . . ‘Theology’ opens, ‘There must be someone else / who wakes disturbed, alone; / too bad we can’t talk on our tiny phone.’ These poems are that tiny phone, connecting us to Wright and all that his poems remind us we can endure.” —Literary Hub