Cooling Time

· C.D. Wright is one of the country’s “watched” poets · This is C.D.’s first book of prose—unruly and undeniably brilliant. · Title refers to a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder. · A bit memoir, a bit poetics, a tad manifesto, and an ongoing argument with books. It is unlike anything out there. · As she writes: “To see better we have to move at whatever pace we can tolerate in the direction of our blind spot, else learn to recognize its advance toward us—which is usually where we are most smugly and snugly ensconced.”