Tyrone Williams new book of poetry is now available from Omnidawn Press , and Amazon.com.
On Spec
By Tyrone Williams
160 pages (6 x 9 paper)
ISBN: 978-1-890-650-33-9
$14.95
Tryone Williams reveals that every act of communication is a speculation, and that the spectacles we must use to see and assess it—those of our own particular condition and conditioning—are never without qualifying contour and coloration. Williams is a keen observer of the distortions of such lenses, as the titles of the two sections of this collection suggest—first is an “Eshuneutics” (interpretation purportedly infused with an Eshu’s sensibility). But the trickster’s eye can turn to mock even its own powers of analysis, as Williams deftly demonstrates by calling the second section “Pseudo-eshuneutics.” While the issues that Williams confronts come directly from an attempt say what it might mean to understand aspects of the African American condition of diaspora in the United States, these poems also implicate and illuminate the speculative enterprise that we each venture into whenever we attempt to articulate what we see and what we believe about it. At once immediately readable, intensely meditative, and brilliantly braced with philosophical reference, these tours through our human need to speak, and to understand, travel beyond the boundaries that constrain most poetry collections. Poems, plays, plays upon the making of such genre distinctions, are only some of the locations one will visit in these pages.
Tyrone Williams first book of poetry, titled C.C., was published by Krupskaya in 2002. His poetry chapbooks include Musique Noir(Overhere Press 2006). AAB (Slack Buddha), and Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press 2004). His poems have been published in magazines, including Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, Caliban, Colorado Review, and Xcp. And his poems have been anthologized in anthologies, including Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry (Miame University Press 2005) and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner 2003). He received his Doctorate of English from Wayne State University. He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.
Praise for On Spec
On Spec excels in cultural poetics transmuted into lyric. Non-identity critique speculates on dialect and dialectics at once, with no end of signifying resourcefulness and no limit of self. And yet the poetry in On Spec is as disciplined as it is brave and free.
—Marjorie Welish
yrone Williams maps the social space of language with an unflinching ear: tracing the networks of unintended associations trailing behind words from different registers and plotting the vectors at which disparate planes of idiom and vernacular intersect. In this eshuneutics (interpretation from the perspective of the Yoruba trickster, or what Jacques Derrida would identify as the “+ex effect”), Williams distinguishes himself by refusing to look away from the chance connotations of a word, however uncomfortable they may be.
Type: the printed body of poetry; a social position; a class of blood. In the line described by the intersection of these denotations we can read the racial ideology of the text. Sprint: another kind of race; the run of ink obscuring print; the socially coded architecture of a “bluesprint.” Cant: to use the special jargon of a particular class or subject; to adapt with a bias; something oblique; the poetic possibilities inherent in deskilled impossibility (”cant,” connoting the contraction of cannot, ain’t, as they say, in the dictionary). That is: language here is historical, lived, creatively torqued and leveraged — it “makes do.” Williams reminds us that the semantic skin of the word — like any interpellated subject — is always a performance, adapting to the pressures and camouflage of context however hard we work to fix it.
Honestly? Specifically? No need to take this book on spec: the pay(off) is guaranteed.
—Craig Dworkin
