material, and if a great poet cannot continue to be original, then he is really not all that great... In this text there is a joyfulness that energizes and makes us feel the writing as a purposeful surge. It is a life force. This is a good indicator of literary art... Memory and the past, mortality, longing, childhood, time, space, geography and loneliness, are all the poet's playthings. In these conversations with himself, Franz Wright shows how the mind works with his feelings and his brain's agility in its struggle with the heart." Cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune Julia Keller says that Kindertotenwald is "ultimately about joy and grace and the possibility of redemption, about coming out whole on the other side of emotional catastrophe." "This collection, like all of Wright's book, combines familiar, colloquial phrases--the daily lingo you hear everywhere--with the sudden sharpness of a phrase you've never heard anywhere, but that sounds just as familiar, just as inevitable. These pieces are written in closely packed prose, like miniature short stories, but they have a fierce lilting beauty that marks them as poetry. Reading 'Kindertotenwald' is like walking through a plate-glass window on purpose. There is--predictably--pain, but once you've made it a few steps past the threshold, you realize it wasn't glass after all, only air, and that the shattering sound you heard was your own heart breaking. Healing, though, is possible. "Soon, soon," the poet writes in "Nude With Handgun and Rosary," "between one instant and the next, you will be well." Awards 1985, 1992 National Endowment for the Arts grant 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship 1991 Whiting Award 1996 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Walking to Martha's Vineyard Selected works The Toy Throne, Tungsten Press (2015) The Writing, Argos Books, 2015, The Raising of Lazarus, Tungsten Press (2014) F, Knopf, 2013 Kindertotenwald Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, "7 Prose", Marick Press, 2010, Wheeling Motel Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, Earlier Poems, Random House, Inc., 2007, God's Silence, Knopf, 2006, Walking to Martha's Vineyard Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, The Beforelife A.A. Knopf, 2001, Knell Short Line Editions, 1999 ILL LIT: Selected & New Poems Oberlin College Press, 1998, Rorschach test, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995, The Night World and the Word Night Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1993, Entry in an Unknown Hand Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989, Going North in Winter Gray House Press, 1986 The