One with Others

"Everyone should be favored to know one person of courage and genius, though that person arrives with all the flaws and fiends that vex the rest of us, sometimes in disproportionate abundance." For Wright, the Arkansas poet who died at 67 earlier this year, that person was a woman she refers to in this book-length poem as "V.", whose furious, hopeful dissatisfaction with the world as she found it led her, a white woman, to join eight black men in a 1969 "March Against Fear," which in turn led her to be run out of the state. Wright's furious, hopeful tribute is elliptical with roundabout reflections, news reports, and the sobering lesson that "You have your life / until you use it."