From his initial appearance in the Langston Hughes–edited anthology New Negro Poets U.S.A. (1964), Jay Wright (b. 1935, Albuquerque) has published fourteen volumes of poetry and been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the American Book Award, and Yale’s Bollingen Prize. Key works include Transfigurations: Collected Poems (2000) and The Guide Signs (2007), both from LSU Press. His collection Boleros was translated into Spanish and published by the University of Veracruz in 2005.
The instrument did not choose this ceremony.My mother offered me five strings, nounswithout a grammar.I left my mother’s emptiness, to embrace my own.Whose darkness sits in the north,if no one can sin…