We’re thrilled to announce our first title of 2024: At His Desk In the Past, new poems by the late Franz Wright (1953-2015).
Edited and with a critical afterword by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, At His Desk In The Past comprises previously unpublished fragments of Wright’s iterative responses to what he called “one of the greatest lines of poetry in the world”: It’s raining again in a dead language, a translation by Stuart Friebert from the German poet Karl Krolow.
Cover by Darren Canham
At His Desk In The Past collects these previously unpublished fragments, which Wright composed on a handheld digital recorder in 2011 and 2012. Elizabeth O. Wright recalls:
As Franz completed work on his manuscript for F in 2011, he also returned to unfinished (including published) material using a hand-held digital recorder to write and re-write by voice alone, adapting to recent difficulty due to severe ulnar nerve damage in both hands. After a few months, whether dictating to the recorder, his computer or to me, he began to improvise without the aid of a written first draft, in many cases without producing any interim written drafts.
Elizabeth O. Wright selected recordings from January 12 and April 13, 14, 19, and 21, 2012 for this collection, the first U.S. publication of new work since Franz Wright’s passing in 2015. As Elizabeth notes in her afterword, the fragments reflect language that captivated Wright throughout his life, echoing in some of his earliest poems ("Winter: Twilight & Dawn," "Night Writing," and "The Earth Will Come Back From the Dead") and in his final, as-yet unpublished full-length manuscript, Axe in Blossom, forthcoming from Knopf.
In addition to the print publication of At His Desk In The Past, Foundlings Press will release an accompanying audiobook—all five of the recordings of Wright composing these fragments.
Preorders are open now and copies will ship in fall 2024.
About Franz Wright
Franz Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, was born in Vienna Austria in 1953 and grew up in the Northwest, the Midwest, and northern California. His works include The Beforelife (2001), Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003), God’s Silence (2006), Earlier Poems (2007), Wheeling Motel (2009), Kindertotenwald (2011), and F (2013). In addition to the Pulitzer for Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, he was the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Fellowship, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. An active member of his local recovery and mental health community, Wright spent many years as a volunteer at The Children’s Room, a peer support group for grieving children. Son of the poet James Wright, Franz Wright died on May 14, 2015.
Photo courtesy Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright