"An unruly paean to American poetry, Cooling Time blurs the divisions between poem, memoir, and essay, while borrowing regularly from the peculiarities and backwaters of the American idiom. The book's title derives from a line of legal defense, unique to Texas courts: if a person kills someone before having had time "to cool" after receiving an injury or an insult, he is not guilty of murder. Ever focused on possibilities, C.D. Wright demonstrates that "the search for models becomes a search for alternatives." Filled with humor, eroticism, and an hypnotic fascination with language, Cooling Time is a prickly love-letter to the life of poetry."--Jacket.