Instructions for Killing the Jackal

“A striking new voice on the poetry scene, Erica Wright’s work is hard-hitting and unafraid. Instructions for Killing the Jackal is bewildering, and like the title poem, pierces through you, tells you: ‘we could sand each other, until we got to the good parts.’ Raw and powerful, this book keeps us ruminating.”

-Nathalie Handal

The poems in Erica Wright’s bold debut balance their investigations of danger, dysfunction and bad weather not merely with beauty and poise (although she is generous with both) but also with an imaginative counterforce all her own. In poem after poem, she sinks her heels into adversity, pulls back on its rope like a pro, and throws down in a language equal to the experience. Wright knows life’s hardships leave their imprints on us, and that there is beauty to be found in the imprinted face-not a delicate prettiness, but a beauty that celebrates persistence, resilience, valor. ‘Sever my salt-beaten cords,’ she writes in her tough little anthem, ‘Prow,’ and ‘let me…make home / among the wrecked and wonderful.’ In this remarkable book-with all its brilliant feats of metaphor, formal prowess, and hard-won wisdom-she has done just that.”

-Timothy Donnelly

Erica Wright’s brilliant, gutsy, clear-eyed poems take on her life and its people, the ‘wrecked and the wonderful,’ with uncanny perception, dead-on amusement, and restrained sorrow. Her indelible imagery-the small town preacher catching toast in his teeth, a cobra with its mouth sewn shut, loosening the stitches enough to hiss-gets into your head and under your skin and alters your vision of bittersweet experience, skewers it, deepens it on the spot.”

-Emily Fragos