Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois. He was drafted in 1971, but was discharged as a conscientious objector. Wrigley is the first in his family to graduate from college, and the first male for generations to escape work in a coal mine. His poems are concerned with rural Western landscapes and humankind’s place within the natural world, and he aims to “tell all the truth, but make it sing.”
By Robert Wrigley
More oblique the eagle’s angle
than the osprey’s precipitous fall,
but rose up both and under them dangled
a trout, the point of it all.
Festooned, a limb on each one’s
favored tree either side of the river,
with chains of bone and lace of skin
the...
By Robert Wrigley
You want a piece of me
to see, from the flesh of me,
a flesh from within me
no one’s ever seen, not me,
nor the mother or the lovers of me.
A piece that will have been me
but then no longer me,
instead a synecdoche...
