Title:
DISINHERITANCE
Author: John Sibley Williams
Publisher: Apprentice House Press
Pages: 98
Genre: Poetry
Author: John Sibley Williams
Publisher: Apprentice House Press
Pages: 98
Genre: Poetry
A lyrical, philosophical, and tender exploration of the
various voices of grief, including those of the broken, the healing, the
son-become-father, and the dead, Disinheritance
acknowledges loss while celebrating the uncertainty of a world in constant
revision. From the concrete consequences of each human gesture to soulful
interrogations into “this amalgam of real / and fabled light,” these poems
inhabit an unsteady betweenness, where ghosts can be more real than the flesh
and blood of one’s own hands.
For More Information
Disinheritance may be purchased at Amazon.Praise for Disinheritance:
“In John Sibley Williams’ moving, somber collection, the
power of elegy, reverie, and threnody transcends the disinheritance caused by
separation. These compellingly atemporal poems form the locus wherein
generations of a family can gather. Here, Williams’ lyric
proto-language—elemental, archetypal, primordial—subsumes barriers of time and
space. His poems create their own inheritance.”
—Paulann
Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate
Emerita
“There is eternal longing in these poems of John Sibley
Williams. A yearning for what cannot be understood. A song for what simply is.
A distance beyond human measurement. The dead and alive dancing, hurting, and
praying at the mouth of what must be the beginning of time. A series of
profound losses giving birth to words no different from medicine.”
—Zubair Ahmed
Book Excerpt:
Truce
A panic of finches rises and tonight
the late salmon moon is filled
with rivers and old shadows. Reflected,
iridescing, an amalgam of real
and fabled light. I rub grains of wood and cloud
between my hands and stretch from the grass
into a grandmotherly story of angels,
their necessary demons, and how little
it takes for the one to climb or descend into
the other. This is what she told me before
she climbed or descended. The distance from us was
the same. This is how she explained where I’d gone
and am going.
My hands don’t remember much anymore
of where the birds have flown. There are felled trees
in the sky. The moon’s face drifts across the river.
And I miss the hard geometries of coffins.
