Readers of Wright's earlier collections will recognize the informal stanza construction and clipped lines that seem to snap in rage at times and stutter with apprehension at others. This flexibility lends varying degrees of morphological and lingual resonance to given words and phrases, but it also gives rise to a dangerously disarming semblance of breeziness. Though occasionally roguish, his poems are never breezy. His father, James, was best known for his seriousness, gained in hard years growing up in the Great Depression, the son of a factory worker. Franz inherited not only a degree of this seriousness but also the short lines his father began using in the early '70s.
Rats prefer it to food.
While borrowing, he tempers his father's rugged gravity with a sarcasm and volatility entirely his own. Of saying it's time to be weaned, your conflagration starved to diamond. I'll give you something to cry about. And what those treetops swaying dimly in the wind spelled. The surface confessionalism of many poems in The Beforelife, while seeming to reflect little more than that description confers, allows greater depths to emerge for one who stares long enough through their surfaces.