Description
- Pages: 87
- Language: English
- ISBN: 978-1-933675-63-3
Praise
Williams’ work, new or old, is potent as it is playful. While the clash and synthesis of “innocent” and loaded turns of phrase give the work its song, Williams’depth and intentionality draw back the curtain, sometimes the flesh, to reveal the cultural, political and social baggage we’ve been carrying and often denying. Spend some time with him and your assumption may not sit so easy. —Kim Hunter
These poems are at once a road trip of a new type and a tour of the little known icons of our urban landscape, where brand-name objects and what might be called “literary” symbols get all mixed together in these verses that consider space, love and lovers, small rooms, and even smaller cars. In “Adventures of Pi”, Williams holds a mirror up to our own world, where everyday life moves along “like traffic/accidents observed from helicopters//that fail to finger the finger/that/popped/up/ just before the pile-up.” —Geoffrey Jacques
Excerpt
White Noise (Fighting To Wake Up)
black/out
exploding ache
and then, no aching
as I try to raise an arm, and fall,
utter a word, or sound, and fail,
civil war
of a body dreaming two dreams,
only one of which is called
a black man in america,
the other, america
itself, which a white man,
sitting alone in the bleachers
around a deserted diamond,
might mistake
for a rope in the back of a truck,
or a lone tree in foul
territory, or worse,
all three.
Author
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of three books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002), on spec (omnidawn Publishing, 2008) and The Hero Project of the century (The Backwaters Press, 2009) and several chapbooks, including a prose eulogy, Pink Tie (Hooke Press, 2011). He has completed a manuscript of poetry commissioned by atelos Books. His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend/
