Beautiful Country - 9780143118374

One that is a singular part of a singular planet---an experiment in democratic governance still aspiring toward perfection, with an exuberant and frequently exasperating culture. In such a country, the glimpse of a horse under a full moon can be a defining moment, full of grace and a new, if not always comfortable, awareness. So it is with a saved lock of a lover's hair, the memory of a vanished glacier, or a childhood friend disappeared in war. As it is with a T-shirt company called "American Fear" or with a disabled soldier shaking hands at a gas pump. Elegiac and lyrical, playful and angry, Beautiful Country offers a vision that is fierce, unflinching, and clear.

"Lives of the Animals is, in my opinion, a living, breathing, honest-to-goodness contemporary masterpiece."---John Burnside, The Poetry House, Scotland

"Reign of Snakes must surely be reckoned by almost any standard as an outstanding and genuinely challenging achievement. The words of praise on the book's cover are no puffery; these really are deep, dense, and richly intertextual poems that resonate with the language, images, emotions, and truths of centuries of poetry."---Stephen C. Behrendt, Prairie Schooner

"In Wrigley's poems, all aspects of a place are deeply loved and deeply observed....Such love and observation, of course, tell us as much about the poet as about the place, and tell us finally that the two are inseparable....The marvel of Wrigley's poetry is how deeply it makes us, too, of the place."---Richard Wakefield, The Seattle Times