Description:
With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers... This is a book you'll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again.--Susan Rich
Brief description:
John Sibley Williams is the author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), skycrape (WaterSedge Poetry Chapbook Contest), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).
A thirty-five-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. Previous publishing credits include: Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.
John holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rivier University and an MA in Book Publishing from Portland State University. He is the founder and head teacher of Caesura Poetry Workshop, a virtual workshop series, and serves as co-founder and editor of The Inflectionist Review. He also works as a poetry editor and book coach. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and boisterous young twins, Kaiya and Addy.
Review Quotes: "Reading the poems in John Sibley Williams' prophetic new book, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, I kept envisioning Goya's famously austere painting, 'El Perro Semihundido, ' which hangs in the Prado. That painting shows the head of a lone submerged dog with eyes looking upward, overwhelmed, almost subsumed by an ominous umbral mass below (perhaps a torrent of murky floodwater or the dismal edge of a ravine or dune). The distant grimy sky offers neither comfort nor answer to the dog's desperate plight. Nature itself seems set against him. Yet still the beast refuses to succumb, continuing to struggle and, perhaps, to hope for salvation. Williams' poems recount ecological disaster, persistent conflagrations, physical and mental decline, addiction, death, familial dissolution and loss, and relentless communal decay in the Pacific Northwest, as well as fatherly adoration, protection, and resilience. Although the settings are different, Goya's painting and Williams' poems share a sense of existential abandonment and powerlessness, but also courage and dogged persistence in the face of tumult. Though dire, neither is delirious or melodramatic. Instead, both dare to distill the stark dilemma of living in their times. They are truth-tellers, spurning delusion and distraction in favor of stern, lyrical disclosure. "-- "Rhino Poetry"