Not pictured by Kimberly Wright

Kimberly Wright‘s Not Pictured is word drunk and in love with the world above her head and around her body, a world that is teeming with spiders, frogs, dogs, monsters, and men, who are sometimes Beelzebubbas. “My heart,” she says, ” is a greedy fish prowling / an inland sea” where she charts the love and heartbreak that occurs in every life but with such precision and with so much energy and affection that the reader becomes a part of her pageant. She takes you to Mars and to her son’s swimming lesson and to a murdered girl’s grave. This is a thrilling journey, one you will want to take again and again. A splendid debut.

–Barbara Hamby

Kim Wright‘s smart and edgy poems are filled to the brim with the strange and beautiful stuff of this world.  In them, the familiar is made alien, and the alien, oddly familiar.  Like a scientist, she probes deeply into figures of dark mystery, and discovers what’s hidden there.  This book is a record of terrific searching, and powerful, surprising findings. 

–Jim Murphy, author of The Uniform House and Professor of English, University of Montevallo

“In NOT PICTURED, Kim Wright offers us a nightmarish, darkly comic vision of both the present and the future. Full of astronauts and possums, RVs and environmental apocalypse, these poems writhe with a captivating rhythm and strangeness. I’m such a sucker for this combo of Deep South and Sci-Fi. “

–Gabrielle Bates   

Kimberly L. Wright’s Not pictured more than lives up to Louis Simpson’s famous dictum from his poem, “American Poetry”:  “Whatever it is, it must have / A stomach that can digest / Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.” These bravura poems treat horror, the grotesque, and the rotten with surpassing affection and enthusiasm. Among the poems Wright’s poetry has digested must be Charles Baudelaire’s. Immersing us in its subterranean and unearthly milieus, this book is a rare and abiding delight.

–Angela Ball, who earned the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry in 2006.