Mutiny
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2022 American Book Award
Finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry
Longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Finalist for Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Named one of the Best Books of 2021 by The Boston Globe and Lit Hub
From the critically acclaimed author of Thief in the Interior who writes with "a lucid, unmitigated humanity" (Boston Review), a startling new collection about revolt and renewal
Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In poems that rebuke classical mythos and western canonical figures, and embrace Afro-Diasporanfolk and spiritual imagery, Phillip B. Williams conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined and then, through a force and generosity of vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the borderline between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger, and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the remarkable second collection from Williams (Thief in the Interior), the poet writes powerfully about masculinity, Blackness, selfhood, anger, loneliness, and love. The first poem beckons, "Come, sit at my bedside," and what follows is the complex and potent honesty of someone who admits, "I too have wielded a knife/ to execute someone I love more than myself." These poems shimmer with thematic heft without shying away from anger and disappointment. Balancing tenderness with rage, and love with pain, Williams offers a complex portrait of a speaker navigating a society whose history is one of brutality. As he asks in "January 28, 1918": "What is the border between tragedy and beauty?" In "Final Poem for a King," he admits, "There's a condemned house in me," while in "January 1, 2018," he writes, "I remain in laughter./ It is my latest state of being, of matter." These poems capture the resounding loneliness and grace that arrive after anger has burned away, while offering rewarding and memorable images that celebrate the opportunities to appreciate the chance for survival and renewal.
