Stilettos in a Rifle Range (Made in Michigan Writer Series)

Literature & Fiction

Williams, Tyrone

Poetry

Wayne State University Press

As iZ is a tripartite lyric (Pharmacy, To Market and Library), a multi-prong investigation into the relationship between the West and East, the entangled networks among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the dynamics among Islamic practices and pre-Islamic cultures. It is, in this sense, a meditation on the vacillation between between-ness and among-ness, the two and the many, and the desire to escape both two-ness and many-ness into the singularity of one on the way to extinction, the bone at zero.

As iZ

Omnidawn

Tyrone Williams reveals that every act of communication is a speculation, and that the spectacles we must use to see and assess it―those of our own particular condition and conditioning―are never without qualifying contour and coloration. Williams is a keen observer of the distortions of such lenses, as the titles of the two sections of this collection suggest―first is an “Eshuneutics” (interpretation purportedly infused with an Eshu’s sensibility). But the trickster’s eye can turn to mock even its own powers of analysis, as Williams deftly demonstrates by calling the second section “Pseudo-eshuneutics.” While the issues that Williams confronts come directly from an attempt say what it might mean to understand aspects of the African American condition of diaspora in the United States, these poems also implicate and illuminate the speculative enterprise that we each venture into whenever we attempt to articulate what we see and what we believe about it. At once immediately readable, intensely meditative, and brilliantly braced with philosophical reference, these tours through our human need to speak, and to understand, travel beyond the boundaries that constrain most poetry collections. Poems, plays, plays upon the making of such genre distinctions, are only some of the locations one will visit in these pages.

On Spec

Poetry. African American Studies. "I began writing HOWELL about fifteen years ago in the wake of the Oklahoma bombing and subsequent trials of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (Michael Fortier was given partial immunity in exchange for his testimony against McVeigh). The title refers to some newspaper accounts of the itinerary of McVeigh in Michigan when he visited and stayed at the Nichols brothers' home 'near Howell, Michigan.' The location of the Nichols house, near Troy, Michigan, is actually nowhere 'near' Howell, and this 'error' is the catalyst for the poem, itself a kind of 'writing through' the history of Howell, Michigan (there are, at last count, at least four different histories of Howell online, and these constitute the major divisions of the poem), as well as the birthplaces, towns and regions of Nichols and Fortier."—Tyrone Williams

Howell

Atelos

Poetry. African American studies. "Williams' intensely moving first book bridges more gaps than many words (and careers) thrice as long: quiet humor to quiet anger; weighty concerns (cybernetics, anthropology, astronomy) to formal invention; brilliant appropriation to startling beauty; street language to a full panoply of sophisticated theory; above all between African American concerns and those of the plain vanilla majority. The reference, as craft and time demand, is ever to mother language"--Nathaniel Tarn. "Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history"--Susan Howe.

C.C.

Krupskaya