Phillip B. Williams is author of the novel Ours (Viking, 2024) and the full-length poetry collections Mutiny (Penguin Poets, 2021), winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Whiting Award, and a Lambda Literary Award, all in 2017. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. A nominee for an NAACP Image Award in poetry, Williams is the recipient of fellowships from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. He serves as a faculty member in the MFA programs of New York University and Randolph College.
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Phillip B. Williams Introduces Jasmine Reid
In Jasmine Reid’s poems, I find nature’s innate life transcribed as idiolect for the speaker’s body, desire, and acts of relating to another (betrothed, lover, the erotic self). Whatever each […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Pastoral, Not Withstanding
The poplar knows the edge of voice and permits hidingin its shade. The magnolia holds what is holy closeto its darkness. The boughs no more a fear-tracedremembrance (Oh the fire […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
The Lengthening and Shortening of Shadow
I.Formidable, the lightdawn breaks across the fieldof our vision is stationary.We revolve around our own potentialseeing. The tree knows nothing more is needed but stillness and rise,rootwork and praiseas boughs […]
Nature's Nature
Summer 2024
Aide-Mémoire
Bones sing to water the crowded graves. All elegies the elegy before: break and cycle. Elegies water the graves and crowded bones. Break the crowded bones and the graves sing. […]
Nature’s Nature
Mar/Apr 2021
Final Poem for the Moon
My first lover, my clavicle’s chiseler sculpting me into blue lamentation and crucible for your lunacy, summon me to scuttle forward — Cancer moon, Cancer rising — and fill myself on your dust-flashed […]
Poetry
Jan/Feb 2016
Luminous, Whatever Honey
I go to twist the knob of a burning skull that burns because the canyon sun has touched curve after curve of the hard, soiled thing into luminosity, as though […]
Summer 2014
Birth of the Doppelgänger
It was on the highway, high beams cut across mangled ribs. Road kill