Wrong

In Wrong, his third book in five years, Reginald Shepherd deploys the explicit reticence unique to his work to make numinous events marked by desire, disease, difference (the signal markers of human consciousness). Perhaps it is not possible to be a black (or a gay) American artist without an acute sense of the quotidian immediacy of history. But Shepherd's historical perspective is also (rich paradox) that of a classicist, a writer whose experience co-exists with a sense of the immanence, the re-inhabitation and re-vision, of Greco-Roman myth and of the shadowy border where myth and history mingle. That border is the true location of Reginald Shepherd's poems, as they engage in calculated drifting on the razor's edge between moment and memory.

These poems tread between subtle forms and raw power, never compromising but holding the two together in a difficult tension. Wrong continues the work of Shepard's previous two books, the AWP prize -winning Some Are Drowning, and Angel, Interrupted , but it pushes the possibilities of a constricting and potentially poisonous history even further toward the margin of liberation. These poems are never still, always ravished by the mouth of the moment, until they almost stand in a body that is somehow dying and surving at the same time.

Shepherd's third book differs from the others in its close attention to the impulses toward aggression inherent in desire. . . . Shepherd struggles particularly with his search for illumination, and many of his poems are characterized by a photographer's or painter's eye for detail and visual pattern. Through what he seeks to see, Shepherd questions the 'wrongness' of what so captivates him as a writer.