Jeffrey Cyphers Wright

Survision, 2024

Winner of Survision Magazine's 2024 James Tate prize, Jeffrey Cyphers Wright's collection of 22 sonnets, Fuel for Love is now available from Survision Books and from Amazon.

The title poem:

Fuel for Love

Sundown drags some fiery slag into a gap
in the Jersey skyline. Day’s wick meets
the star trimmer and glides toward
the target area. Harvesting goodbyes.

Old statues vow to obey whatever
green habits they have donned. Shadows
of wigs weave through the parks’ limbs.

Windfall plums bruise the ground.
Our story, a road of half-used light.

Welcome to the hero you’ve squeezed
out of an antique compass.
Checking the mirror, our driver signals.

Now, cashing in the tokens of distance,
what we run on expands as it diminishes.

And from James Berger's Fjords review:

This variation of stanzas within the sonnet form is both ingenious and purposeful. The stanza, for Wright, is a unit of thought and sound, or breath

Perhaps, at last, the “fuel for love” is the poem itself: the conjoined acts of observation, feeling, and invention that connect consciousness to world...