One Big Self by C.D. Wright

If I'm not mistaken, this book was originally released as the text to a big photography book in which Wright wrote the accompanying text to photographs Deborah Luster took of Louisiana state prison inmates, but then Wright decided to publish just the text so that poor poetry aficionados like myself could afford it. Anyway, it's gripping, and Wright does a fantastic job of weaving all of these voices together (a large part of it is created from actual words of the prisoners, so the voices float and repeat like a ghostly chorus throughout the book), and by the end I was feeling pretty terrified and philosophical about life and/or society. Look, justice is broken, but what does this book say about it? I guess it isn't poetry's place to judge, anyway, or take sides. One problem I do have with this book, though, is that Wright often seems to embody these prisoners, and writes in poor or abbreviated vernacular, and uses their "words" to manipulate the emotional being of the reader, but where does this white broad from high society get the right to come on down to the lowest class of citizens, those stripped of rights, and embody their voices like this? It's just that she is no folklorist, so the times when she writes in colloquialisms seems disingenuine and somewhat racist, but whatever she's C.D. Wright and I'm just some guy who watched four Batman movies in 24 hours this weekend.

RATING: 72%