Brief description: Patricia Williams, originally from Illinois, was, for 27 years, a professor of Design at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Although always a vociferous reader, she did not begin writing poetry until early in 2013, after she retired from teaching. "I feel that art, design, music and the literary arts are natural partners-all creatively examine life and living. Poetry is a search for the universal in the personal. Some poems can be taken at face value, some have layers. Each of us reads a poem through our own life filter and each takes away a different understanding or experience." Williams' poems have been published in a variety of print and online journals and anthologies. The Port Side of Shadows, her first chapbook, reflects traveling not only in the physical sense, but in those "uncharted places" of the spirit and the imagination. She lives with her husband in rural central Wisconsin, where she is at work on a new chapbook about country living. Williams has three sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Review Quotes:
Alive to both "the clatter of the settled world" and "the half-light of forbidden places," Patricia Williams explores the intersections of memory and imagination. These poems glint and gleam with passion and loss.
--Sarah Sadie (Sarah Busse), author of a second full-length collection, We
Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, co-Poet Laureate of
Madison, Wisconsin (2012-2015), Pushcart winner
Travel with Patricia Williams and her image-rich poems in The Port Side of Shadows. Experience "the last ride of childhood / on a merry-go-round" (Perils and Choices). Hear the "symphony of darkness" (Night Music), and feel the "sky-burials--spirits riding on columns of air" (Impermanence). This is a transformational journey in verse to uncharted destinations.
--Bruce Dethlefsen, Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2011-2012)
Patricia Williams' poems inhabit a liminal landscape, an in-between place where life and dreams meet, at the edges of consciousness. She travels to faraway places and back home again, exploring and discovering fresh insights along the way--about different cultures, phases of life, new and "long-past selves." I thoroughly enjoyed the journey as I read her poems.
--Elizabeth Tornes, author of Snowbound (Giiwedin Press, 2011), First Prize,
2012 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Contest, New Moon (Finishing
Line Press, 2013) and Between the Dog and the Wolf (Five Oaks Press, 2016)