Jay Wright (born 1934) is an African-American poet, playwright and essayist. Born in New Mexico, he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim. Wright's work is emblematic of what the Guyanese-British writer Wilson Harris has termed the "cross-cultural imagination."

Like Jay Wright's previous poetry, Boleros provokes in the reader "a passion for what is hidden," emphasizing names--of places, muses, saints' days--and the imaginative histories behind them. As always, the linguistic surface changes rapidly as Wright's geographic journeys become explicit explorations of poetic form. Boleros is more than a conventional collection of poems. Each part of the book connects to, engages with, and changes the others, so the book itself becomes a text in motion. These poems perform the creative process itself and succeed exquisitely in making the reader part of that process and its excitement.