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, narrative lines that compel, enthrall, and ensnare. In his latest work, Sudden Prose, 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.
Author
C.K. Williams was born and grew up in and around Newark, New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in philosophy and English. He has published many books of poetry, including Repair, which was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, The Singing which won the National Book Award for 2003, and Flesh and Blood, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Prize in 1987. He has also been awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Voelker Career Achievement Award in Poetry for 1998; a Guggeheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Lila Wallace Fellowship, the Los Angeles Book Prize, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He published a memoir, Misgivings, in 2000, which was awarded the PEN Albrand Memoir Award, and translations of Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Euripides’ Bacchae, and poems of Francis Ponge, Adam Zagajewski, as well as versions of the Japanese Haiku poet Issa. His book of essays, Poetry and Consciousness, appeared in 1998. and his most recent, In Time, in 2012. He published a book about Walt Whitman, On Whitman, in 2010, and in 2012 a book of poems, Writers Writing Dying. A book of prose poems, All At Once, will be published in 2014. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a chancellor of the American Academy of Poets.
