Stilettos in a Rifle Range

Poems about the joys and struggles of complex, contemporary life—and heartbreak.


Written against a backdrop of heartbreak and loneliness and spanning the geography of Cincinnati, Detroit, and New York, this is a complex, intriguing book of poetry that plays dynamically with language as each new reading brings forth something unseen from the previous reading. Highlighting the varied modes of writing that Tyrone Williams has mastered—the fractal lyric, the metahistorical fable, the atomic lexical—stilettos in a rifle range reveals in high resolution the power of representational strategies within American English. Williams’s language in particular is an intralingual love affair that all will enjoy.