Socrates is Mortal by Stephen Williams

Socrates is Mortal by Stephen Williams

$23.00

If Socrates Is Mortal weren’t a textbook example of a syllogism (All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore), it might be the title of a situational comedy set somewhere deep in Pascal’s “eternal silence of infinite spaces.” Minor poetic genres—the epigram, the song, the fable, the fragment, the joke, the imagistic aperçu, the spell—converge in a grotesque carnival of expirations and nativities. The book’s five sets of poems—“Dead End / Ad Infinitum”; “Don’t Move”; “Phosphorescent Fiction”; “Click”; and “Origin Pit”—move through openings in history, myth, popular culture, public and private life, language, and logic itself, while its recursive structures seek to restore a distinction between tragedy and farce.

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Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 168
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: December 2025
  • ISBN 978-1-962847-40-7

Excerpt

A LIFE

‘craftsman of the snowflake’
so Berryman, so much
convulsed, called God—

whose suffering was undignified,
who would have died
for his art, but instead
a waste of shame succumbed quite simply
the only way he knew how

did he avert his gaze
with an upward look?
—who knew damnation is real
and very close
and runs through everything like the Mississippi

converted himself in 1970 toward a god he could almost
dare to love
emptied his tin cup heart
scoured it clean

Then?

o from out of the tar and ash and shit
from the origin pit

‘accept my amazement’

Author

Stephen WilliamsStephen Williams is the author of Earth Enough (Dos Madres, 2021), The Star of the End (Dos Madres, 2022), and Is and Isn’t (selva oscura, forthcoming 2026). He lives in Chicago.

Additional information

Weight 11 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × .5 in

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