Williams, I: Personals

Shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize.

These are not love poems. These are almost-love poems. Jittery, plaintive, and fresh, Personals is voiced through a startling variety of speakers who continually rev themselves up to the challenge of connecting with others, often to no avail. Williams writes in traditional poetic forms: ghazals, a pantoum, blank sonnets, mock-heroic couplets, and creates forms of his own: poems that spin into indeterminacy, poems that don't end. With a deft hand and playful ear, Williams entices the reader to stumble alongside his characters as they search, again and again, for intimacy, for love, for each other.