Flowers for the Dead

Literature & Fiction

WILLIAMS, C.K.

Genre Fiction

One More Chapter

The Nobble lives in a world all his own—a fantastical world where you can do the impossible things of dreams. It’s a nice life and all he’s ever known. Yet one day he begins to think about finding some place he hasn’t been yet. Or maybe seeing something he hasn’t seen yet. Or . . . something. So he sets off on a journey to an unusual place, where he discovers roary things, fuzzy things, and tall, shiny, rectangular things. Then a door knocks. If only he knew what a door was . . .
C. K. Williams and Stephen Gammell’s enchanting tale is about finding the courage to go out and search for what you want most in the world. And sometimes, that’s a friend.

How the Nobble Was Finally Found

Children's Books

Clarion Books

A boy walks through a forest full of snakes and wolves and bears, but this boy isn't afraid because he knows they'll stay out of his way. The scary monster in this forest won't stay out of his way, though. He pops out at the boy and growls! But the brave boy just keeps walking along because he doesn't believe in monsters. This sets the monster to begging and begging for the boy to believe in him, even just a smidge. Will the boy ever agree? This unusual monster story, with thrills and fangs and growls, shows that a little confidence and a lot of courage can shrink fears to a size that might even be a little cuddly.

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things

Humor

Mutability; uncertainty; a universe of precipitous change: these themes are at the heart of Sophocles' tragic vision. But nowhere are they elaborated with more urgency than in Women of Trachis. There are no subtle shifts of Fortune's favors in this tragedy, only stunning and total reversals, a relentless spinning of her fickle wheel. Thesis moves to crushing antithesis with an unparalleled violence at the moment of transformation. Thought to have been written about 440 BC, midway through the poet's career, Women of Trachis has long suffered from neglect by scholars despite its sophistication and raw energy. This translation at last rescues the immense lyrical power and tragic grandeur of the play from obscurity, restoring the music of a poetry originally meant to be sung and danced collectively.

Women of Trachis (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

SOPHOCLES

Dickerson, Gregory W.

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

Mutability; uncertainty; a universe of precipitous change: these themes are at the heart of Sophocles' tragic vision. But nowhere are they elaborated with more urgency than in Women of Trachis. There are no subtle shifts of Fortune's favors in this tragedy, only stunning and total reversals, a relentless spinning of her fickle wheel. Thesis moves to crushing antithesis with an unparalleled violence at the moment of transformation. Thought to have been written about 440 BC, midway through the poet's career, Women of Trachis has long suffered from neglect by scholars despite its sophistication and raw energy. This translation at last rescues the immense lyrical power and tragic grandeur of the play from obscurity, restoring the music of a poetry originally meant to be sung and danced collectively.

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse, he has written on topics as resonant as war, social injustice, love, family, sex, death, depression, and intellectual despair and delight. He is also a gifted essayist, and In Time collects his best recent prose along with an illuminating series of interview excerpts in which he discusses a wide range of subjects, from his own work as a poet and translator to the current state of American poetry as a whole. In Time begins with six essays that meditate on poetic subjects, from reflections on such forebears as Philip Larkin and Robert Lowell to “A Letter to a Workshop,” in which he considers the work of composing a poem. In the book’s innovative middle section, Williams extracts short essays from interviews into an alphabetized series of reflections on subjects ranging from poetry and politics to personal accounts of his own struggles as an artist. The seven essays of the final section branch into more public concerns, including an essay on Paris as a place of inspiration, “Letter to a German Friend,” which addresses the issue of national guilt, and a concluding essay on aging, into which Williams incorporates three moving new poems. Written in his lucid, powerful, and accessible prose, Williams’s essays are characterized by reasoned and complex judgments and a willingness to confront hard moral questions in both art and politics. Wide-ranging and deeply thoughtful, In Time is the culmination of a lifetime of reading and writing by a man whose work has made a substantial contribution to contemporary American poetry.

In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest

Essays & Correspondence

University of Chicago Press

A capstone to an unforgettable career
Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet’s task: to record with candor and ardor “the burden of being alive.” In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind’s encounter with the brute fact of the body’s decay, the spirit’s erasure.
Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly “the dreadful edge of a precipice” where a futureless future stares back. Urgent, unpunctuated, headlong, vertiginous, they race against time to trace the sinuous, startling twists and turns of consciousness. All is coming apart, taken away, except the brilliant art to describe it as the end is coming. All along is the reassurance of love’s close presence.
Here are no easy resolutions, false consolations. Like unanswered prayers, they are poems of deep interrogation―a dialogue between the agonized “I” in its harrowing here-and-nowness and the elusive “you” of the beloved who flickers achingly just out of reach.
Williams’s Falling Ill takes its place among the enduring works of literature about death and departure.

Falling Ill: Last Poems

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Flesh and Blood

Flesh and Blood, the fifth collection by C. K. Williams, was awarded the 1987 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Reviewing it in The New York Times Book Review, Edward Hirsch noted that the book's compression and exactitude gave it "the feeling of a contemporary sonnet sequence." Hirsch added: "Like Berryman's Dream Songs or Lowell's Notebooks, Mr. Williams's short poems are shapely yet open-minded and self-generative, loosely improvisational though with an underlying formal necesity."

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself

The National Book Critics Circle Award-winner offers a powerful, often difficult memoir of his parents, confronting the conflicting forces that conspired to fashion him into the man he is today.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Short, sharp musings on things profound and mundane (and sometimes both) from the Pulitzer Prize winning poet C. K. Williams has never been afraid to push the boundaries of poetic form―in fact, he's known for it, with long, lyrical lines that compel, enthrall, and ensnare. In his latest work, All at Once, Williams again embodies this spirit of experimentation, carving out fresh spaces for himself and surprising his readers once more with inventions both formal and lyrical. Somewhere between prose poems, short stories, and personal essays, the musings in this collection are profound, personal, witty, and inventive―sometimes all at once. Here are the starkly beautiful images that also pepper his poems: a neighbor's white butane tank in March "glares in the sunlight, raw and unseemly, like a breast inappropriately unclothed in the painful chill." Here are the tender, masterful sketches of characters Williams has encountered: a sign painter and skid-row denizen who makes an impression on the young soon-to-be poet with his "terrific focus, an intensity I'd never seen in an adult before." And here are a husband's hymns to his beloved wife, to her laughter, which "always has something keen and sweet to it, an edge of something like song." This is a book that provokes pathos and thought, that inspires sympathy and contemplation. It is both fiercely representative of Williams's work and like nothing he's written before―a collection to be admired, celebrated, and above all read again and again.

All at Once: Prose Poems

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Books by WILLIAMS, C.K.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WILLIAMS, C.K.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Flowers for the Dead

How the Nobble Was Finally Found

A Not Scary Story About Big Scary Things

Women of Trachis (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Women of Trachis (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

In Time: Poets, Poems, and the Rest

Falling Ill: Last Poems

Flesh and Blood

Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself

All at Once: Prose Poems