Repair Poems

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets "Always, "These gigantic inconceivables." Always, "What will have been done to me?" And so we don our mental armor, flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should. A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk, though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?" --from "Risk" Repairis body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence." C. K. Williamsis the author of several books of poems. His work has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Voelcker Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the prestigious Berlin Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2000. Williams teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University and lives part of the year in Paris. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and theLos Angeles TimesBook Prize A National Book Award Finalist This is the eighth book of verseand the most various yetby one of America's leading living poets. An outpouring of nearly fifty new poems,Repairfinds Williams experimenting more than ever with both form and line. His subjects, again, are love, death, secrets among intimates, the waywardness of thought, and the violence and metaphoric power of the natural world. Social disorder is also a strong theme in these pages; a long poem about the sixties, "King," broods over the mixed motives and misunderstandings of that periodand our own. Here is a poet in full maturity, his mastery transforming everything he touches. And throughoutRepair, Williams maintains what Alan Williamson credits him with having so steadily developed from key French influences: "the poetry of the sentence." "A provocative, often gorgeous collection that brims with intellectual zeal and emotional honesty."Jennifer Poyen,The San Diego Union-Tribune "Williams spares neither himself nor the reader anything. This is his singular genius and passion, an absolute de0dication to trying to tell the truth in the most truthful way. Thus, Williams has slowly invented a new form of American free verse, one which most closely imitates our own casual speech . . .Repairpossesses that exact, bewildering, slant rendering of raw emotion and careful thought that is characteristic of Williams's poetry."Liz Rosenberg,The Boston Sunday Globe "Formally, these new poems mark a departure. Underneath, though, they are driven by the familiar Willaims sensibility: intelligent, restless, perpetually unsatisfied, always wanting to know and understand more . . . [An] excellent book."Troy Jollimore,The Boston Book Review "In his long career Williams has performed a rare feat, forging a distinctive style by great labor without a late flop into exhausted mannerism. Past 60, newly a grandfather, he is still a foxy tinkerer, offering a good deal of variety in his characteristic long line, snaking into solid stanzas, couplets, and even prose blocks. He tries out new moods, ecstatic italics here; a bracing gust of Baudelaire's cool irony there; but his project remains consistent: rendering the broadstroke conflicts of consciousness as it arrives at points of decision. 'Risk' asks if we unknowingly crave disaster. An exchange of looks with a hare from within a stranded train allows h

C. K. Williams lives part of the year in Paris and part in New Jersey, and teaches at Princeton University.