Last Wishes

Rob Wright’s Last Wishes is eclectic and delves into mining grit and lifestyle as fluently as it does into spiritual hopes and despairs, or the mind’s lucidity and aberrations. Well-traveled in time and place, Last Wishes’ culturally diverse characters and scenes—framed in Philadelphia, Fort Meyers, Manhattan, São Paulo, Kowloon, Majdanek, or elsewhere—are memorable or miserable. Accounts of ghosts and hauntings, imagined or real, include heart-stopping witness narratives of the Holocaust and other atrocities. This is a seasoned inaugural collection—a special honoree for the 2019 Able Muse Book Award.

PRAISE FOR LAST WISHES

Rob Wright’s poems in Last Wishes ache with a quiet, exquisite music. Whether at the edge of the forest, or before a mirror regarding his own face, or at the limit of what a son can feel for his father, Wright calls us to join him on his search for order and meaning, even as he questions what he finds: “The shell that holds all grief and memory, / in chains of molecules that make a mind, / will turn back into atoms, hungry, free. / We’re spirits caught inside our skin and hair— / ephemeral our dramas, spun from air.” Such is the breathtaking beauty of Last Wishes, to long for what seems so close and yet, in the end, we cannot know.

—Rafael Campo, author of Comfort Measures Only: New and Selected Poems

One of Wright’s gifts is the age-old poetic magic of conveying beauty in what might at first appear to offer up nothing but ugliness. . . . It is fitting that one of the titles here is “Prologue for an Imaginary Play,” because Wright’s poems often are, in essence, little plays. The landscapes here are never static; like a photographer, or a cinematographer, Wright captures his subjects at their most revealing in a flash. Scenes are arranged and rendered at the moment of greatest drama and tension.

—Alison Hicks (from the foreword), author of You Who Took the Boat Out

The first poem in Last Wishes describes in evocatively exact and gritty detail a landscape of abandoned mines, and ends with the poet’s mind reaching out toward the miners who once worked there: “I thought

Rob Wright’s eclectic Last Wishes fluently delves into mining grit, the spirit’s hopes and despairs, or the mind’s lucidity and aberrations as might invoke therapy: "Of course, some things I never will reveal, / like how a dead man climbs into my bed.” Well-traveled in time and place, Last Wishes’ culturally diverse characters and scenes—framed in Philadelphia, Fort Meyers, Manhattan, São Paulo, Kowloon, Majdanek, or elsewhere—are memorable or miserable. Accounts of ghosts and hauntings, imagined or real, include heart-stopp...