Transfigurations
  • Published: 25 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241747421
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

Transfigurations

Collected Poems

Formats & editions
Paperback
25 Nov 2025
EBook
3 Jul 2025
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A poetry collection of epic scale and transformative vision from one of the most innovative American poets

For over half a century, Jay Wright’s poetry has been celebrated for its alertness to the multiplicity of human experience and identity, and championed by eminent literary figures from Carl Phillips to Harold Bloom.

The gravitational pull of Wright’s lyric voice transforms life into myth, body into spirit, image into icon, and ritual into collective consciousness. Revelling in the rich interplay between Native American, African American, Latin American and West African cultural forms, Wright disentangles the threads of these complex historical forces to present a tapestry of the Atlantic World and the people who move within it.

Published for the first time in the UK, Transfigurations is a career-defining volume that includes all of Wright’s twentieth century major poetry works: The Homecoming Singer (1971), Soothsayers and Omens (1976), Explications/Interpretations (1984), Dimensions of History (1976), The Double Invention of Komo (1980), Elaine's Book (1988), Boleros (1991) and Transformations (1997).

Transfigurations is a singular opportunity for readers to fully immerse themselves in the sublime imagination of one of the most profound and enigmatic American poets.
  • Published: 25 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241747421
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $38.00
Categories:

Praise for Transfigurations

A substantial collection of work. [Wright’s] forcefully musical rhythms drive even poems of everyday experience—such as waiting outside church on a warm night—to a pleasingly contradictory transport. And the later, meditative poems are bound to the world by their attention to the sensual within the spiritual

The New Yorker

An astonishing New World epic…of human transfiguration and transformation, of nothing less than the great work of art that is ‘our life among ourselves’

Steven Meyer, Boston Review

Jay Wright is a brilliant and original poet… beating his own unpredictable path through a variety of terrains

John Hollander, The New York Times

One of the most innovative and visionary poets in the American and African-American traditions... [Transfigurations] synthesises Wright's philosophical and transcultural explorations with a dazzling and indelible linguistic music

John Keene, author of <i> Counternarratives </i>