“Entries of the Cell” is some of Franz Wright’s best writing in years. "The cell will teach you all things" is a saying of some early Christians who, in the third century, bewildered to find that no matter what they did and no matter how powerful their faith, the new world they dreamed of far too closely resembled the irreparably corrupt old world. Their remedy to this dilemma was to withdraw from the cities of their time into the desolate solitude in which they found God’s presence perpetually closer and more available to them. The saying has been adopted by the Society of the Brotherhood of St. John the Evangelist where, at their Cambridge branch, T.S. Eliot attended services while teaching at Harvard in the thirties.

This single-poem chapbook is dedicated to Franz Wright’s friend Palestinian poet Fady Joudah, who is also a good husband, dad, and emergency room MD in Houston. Joudah is also the American translator, with FS&G of Darwish...

Franz Wright is the author of fourteen collections of poetry. Walking to Martha's Vineyard (Knopf 2003) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His newest collections, God's Silence, and Earlier Poems were published by Knopf in, 2006 & 2007. Wright's other books include The Beforelife (2001), Ill Lit: New and Selected Poems (1998), Rorschach Test (1995), The Night World and the Word Night (1993), and Midnight Postscript (1993). Mr. Wright has also translated poems by RenŽ Char, Erica Pedretti, and Rainer Maria Rilke. He has received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright has taught in many colleges and universities, including Emerson College and the University of Arkansas. He is currently the writer-in-residence at Brandeis. He has also worked in a mental health clinic in Lexington, Massachusetts, and as a volunteer at the Center for Grieving Children.