<DIV><P>Now in paperback, <I>Steal Away </I>presents C.D. Wright&rsquo;s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new "retablos" and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright&mdash;with her Southern accent and cinematic eye&mdash;couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that "offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning."</P><P><B>from "Our Dust"</B></P><P>You didn&rsquo;t know my weariness, error, incapacity,<br>I was the poet<br>of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch<br>phone books, of failed<br>roadside zoos. The poet of yard eggs and<br>sharpening shops,<br>jobs at the weapons plant and the Maybelline<br>factory on the penitentiary road.<br></P><P>"Wright has found a way to wed fragments of an iconic America to a luminously strange idiom, eerie as a tin whistle."&mdash;<I>The New Yorker</I></P><P>"Wright shrinks back from nothing."&mdash;<I>Voice Literary Supplement</I></P><P>"C.D. Wright is a devastating visionary. She writes in light. She sets language on fire."&mdash;<I>American Letters</I></P><P><B>C.D. Wright </B>has published nine collections of poetry and earned many awards, including the Lannan Literary Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and in 1994 was named State Poet of Rhode Island. With her husband, Forrest Gander, she edits Lost Roads Publishers.</P></DIV>