Personals - Softcover

Williams, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155481104X ISBN 13: 9781554811045

Publisher: Freehand Books, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

Ian Williams is the author of Not Anyone’s Anything (stories, Freehand, 2011) and You Know Who You Are (poems, Wolsak and Wynn, 2010). He completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an English professor at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Williams has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy. He was also a scholar at the National Humanities Center Summer Institute for Literary Study. His writing has appeared in Fiddlehead, Arc, Contemporary Verse 2, Rattle, jubilat, Confrontation, The Antigonish Review, Gargoyle, Folio, Pebble Lake Review, Callaloo, Descant, and Matrix Magazine. He divides his time between Ontario and Massachusetts.

Review:

"Williams has a way with ballooning inconsequential small moments into great significance like a moony newspaper personals' writer. Williams uses the hook of newspaper personals to not only showcase his talent but highlight how aware we all are of everything nowadays yet feel we've missed the magic moment." - The Telegraph Journal

"Ian Williams...plays with language in powerful ways in Personals,often using simple words or phrases as litanies...Williams has a knack for revitalizing conventional lyric subjects while dealing with the language and reality of contemporary corporate bureaucracy." - The Winnipeg Free Press

About this edition

• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 155481104X
• ISBN 13: 9781554811045
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88