Links
to Reviews | Link
to a First Book Interview (Dec. 2008)
Lesley
Wheeler reviews Ashes in Midaiar for VALPARAISO
POETRY REVIEW: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics:
http://www.valpo.edu/vpr/wheelerreviewwilliams.html
Ron
Slate reviews Ashes in Midair on his blog, http://ronslate.com.s6980.gridserver.com/ in
the Reviews and Commentary section:
http://ronslate.com.s6980.gridserver.com/poetry_note_books_susan_settlemyre_williams_robert_bly_and_norman_s_shapiro
Larry
Bradley reviews Ashes in Midair for The Yalobusha Review, the
literary magazine of the University of Mississippi:
http://www.olemiss.edu/yalobusha/book_reviews/bradley_ashes%20in%20midair.htm
Ron Smith reviews Ashes
in Midair for Styleweekly.com
http://www.styleweekly.com/article.asp?idarticle=17005
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2007
Poetry Book Contest Winner selected by Yusef Komunyakaa
Ashes
in Midair by
Susan Settlemyre Williams
"Susan
Settlemyre Williams’s Ashes in Midair is a marvelous book
that, at times, seems almost epic. This poet maps the elemental and the
essential side-by-side, and we are drawn into the necessary fabric of
these sonorous revelations. Here, opposites seem to serve each other;
they make each other almost sacred. Though the poems in Ashes in
Midair often excavate the otherworldly, this poignant collection
also keeps us faithful to the business of this world. From first poem
to last, from basic hunger to the heightened fire located in earthy desire,
the moments of surrealism and shaped dualism throughout this wonderful
body of work abide in leaps of faith. The accrued, urgent, penetrating
beauty in these poems is a gift."
—Yusef
Komunyakaa
"Ashes
in Midair is a four part confessional without the box, lucid monsoon
of emotional harmonies, x-ray scenarios, sinister cages, racing headless
between life and death, voice and shadow. Her poems read like wicked
tarot prophesy, a space where entering names in a book might save one
from discovering that the face of God is never a human face. Williams
is truly a Queen of Wands!”
—Tim
Z. Hernandez, Author of Skin Tax,
Winner
of the American Book Award
“Her
poems the stuff of ‘earth and nightmares,’ Susan Settlemyre
Williams’s greatest gift is in controlling myriad disorientations,
her renderings of even fear and madness becoming darkly beautiful translations
of human experience. Ashes in Midair is a splendid, wholly mesmerizing
volume.”
— Claudia
Emerson, author of Late Wife, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize
for Poetry
"Few
debut collections can claim the confidence of Susan Settlemyre Williams’s.
With immense technical swagger and a nerviness that never overpowers
her considerable empathy and elegiac tenderness, Williams investigates
both the domestic and the strange. She is above all a spiritual writer,
and—like the best such writers—understands that gnosis
arrives as much through desecration as through piety. Ashes in
Midair is a stirring, engrossing, and haunted book."
—David
Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2004
How
many poets are able to sift the human spirit from the ashes? In Susan
Williams’ beautiful first book, even the ghostly presences felt
in a world’s world of dangers are made our intimates. What is personal
is offered up with such close attention that, poem after poem, we find
ourselves nodding “yes.” Her fables deliver the concomitant
mysteries of appearance and disappearance; they unveil the shadow of
the predator while revealing the fierceness with which we long to come
to terms with its purposes. These poems remind us that every work of
art, even art that acknowledges despair is, ultimately, an act of hope.
—Jeffrey
Levine
"The
mythic and the modern speak to each other in these poems, and sometimes
shout, wrestling and clinching and breaking away. Our times and all times
think they have places for women—holes to bury them, pedestals
to raise them again invisible, newly enveloped in patinas fashioned to
be inescapable—while the work here is to break free, to answer
back every time in language that strikes hammer blows from within and
without. In Susan Settlemyre Williams’s writing, an earthquake
drums the underworld, the empty eye is filled, and another resurrection
begins, Ashes in Midair."
Gregory Donovan
author of Calling His Children Home, senior editor of Blackbird
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May 14, 2008
Recently Read
“Ashes in Midair” by
Susan Settlemyre Williams (Many Mountains Moving Press, $15.95)
Williams
worries constantly at that stitched-up place in the psyche where the
secret can become the
sacred. The book’s first poem, “Codes
for Hunger,” erupts in the reader like childhood trauma, reverberating
all the way through the volume, from the ambivalent terrors of youth to
the clouded panics of dementia. We move from childhood’s hurricanes
of dread and delight to maturity’s often sterile control, where “color
[is] sealed inside” and where we must train ourselves to “increments
of pain.” In the unforgettable first section, the speaker sometimes
squirms in her own telling. (“About Glass” and “Slug
Story” might inspire nightmares.) The squirming in these admirably
wrought poems is both psychologically apt and artistically cunning.
Williams knows that the daylight mind is not enough to sustain us. Her
book is interpenetrated with forms of Christianity that allow our pagan
underpinnings to show through. We share experiences with eccentrics who
turn animal skulls into folk art or claim to grow a second head, with witches,
voodoo masters, fortune tellers and the just plain cracked.
Like her
hoodoo priestess Marie Leveau, Williams doesn’t “mess
with pink love candles.” She gives us no sweet, predictable, hackneyed
verse. Williams, like Leveau, becomes a true “flute for the spirit.” And,
young or old, broken or whole, keening or crooning, isn’t that what
our bodies should be? — Ron Smith