Framed by the death of the poet's mother, Reading Water begins by considering how love is born then bound by the bonds of family and friends. These poems undertake a restless search for a self under constant evolution. Grappling with grief, familial and romantic love, and art - using persona and ekphrasis, along with the traditional lyric - this debut collection addresses Dean Young's crucial question: "Who doesn't sense an unbridgeable alienation between ourselves and the world…That our poems speak to no one, not even fully to ourselves?"
In response to this question, over and over again, Reading Water fords the distance that exists between sons, brothers, parents, friends, and lovers—giving voice to the what's unsayable in these relationships. In three sections, the book moves backwards through time, forming an arc that begins with loss, moving on to desire and a beloved, before concluding with propulsive pieces about art and ekphrasis. In these sections, the poet moves from a place of support and community to one of solitude.
This collection considers how we are made, before thinking about what it takes to become a writer or artist, and if solitude is a prerequisite for creation. Images of water's ephemerality, what happens above and below its surface, thread Reading Water together. This collection finds kinship in the work of poets like Brenda Shaughnessy, Nick Flynn, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Gail Mazur, and Alan Shapiro.
Derek JG Williams is an American writer and the author of the nonfiction chapbook, Poetry Is a Disease (Greying Ghost, 2022). He holds a doctorate in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University, and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he won the Brian Rattigan and Mary Doyle Curran Creative Scholarships.
Williams has been selected as a Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. He is a Blacksmith House Emerging Writer. His poem, "These Kingdoms of Ours" was a finalist for RHINO Magazine's Editors Prize. Brenda Shaughnessy selected his poem "Ode to the Tongue" for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology. His writing has appeared on Boston's MBTA trains as a part of the city's Poetry on the T program, while his poems and prose are published in Pleiades, The Writer's Chronicle, Banshee, Poet Lore, Salamander, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
Williams teaches writing courses online, and also works with individual clients to help them establish and reach their creative goals. He is an academic language editor and technical writer who has worked with scholars and researchers at numerous institutions and universities. He currently lives in Switzerland with his family.
"In this mesmerizing book, the 'rich vanishing seasons' of life are rendered beautifully. Each poem about family, each about travel, each poem about love is fluid and precise and memorable. Memory, here, is the 'strongest / of the senses' and its strength is amplified by a deft shaping of the line and a startling imagination rippling in the phrasing, in the imagery. Love, here, is a keyword. These poems radiate with tenderness for parents, for the dead, for a wife. In one poem, the speaker buries his nose 'in the warm / neck' of a dog to 'tell him exactly / how I feel,' and in another poem, he confesses, 'too briefly I love everyone.' This book also centers language: its power, its thingness, and the shadows it casts on the page, in our lives. I had the honor of reading terrific manuscripts for this prize. This book stood out because it was obvious each poem had been shaped by a mind and a heart. Bravo!" — Eduardo Corral, Author of Slow Lightning and Guillotine, Prize Judge
"Derek JG Williams' direct and wide-ranging first book of poems, Reading Water, is full of real pleasures, finding beauty and joy around surprising corners. These poems explore our particular American moment, all of us figuring out what to do with our angers and our loves. We are welcomed in with frank assessments, 'twilight & dusk, / talking shit, the rich, thick gloam / of my young dumb life.' Tom Petty songs and soup, hugging your mom and 'another war on TV,' getting high in the cemetery and throwing chairs, video games and very good dogs: these poems reckon with our losses and celebrate the everyday. A little suspicious, a little hungry, at a party or talking about who should have what guns in 'dumb, broke America,' Reading Water helps us think about what it is to be in a relationship and in a family, being ourselves and doing our best. Often funny, always tender, these poems are with us whether we are holding hands, teaching, bartending, or having to pee: 'the dunes part / it's low tide and briefly / too briefly I love everyone.' " — Jill McDonough, Author of American Treasure, Here All Night, and Reaper
"Reading Water dives deep and dares us to hold our breath. The range here is expansive, with poems both personal and cultural. We find a monologue in the voice of Pavlov's dog, a painting by Picasso, a nod to Gertrude Stein, lyrical odes to the sound of a lover peeing, to prizefighters and starlings, and underneath the glittering surfaces of form, in the depths between water and skin, in long lines and short forms that shimmer like light on water, you will find the intricacies of our own frail human hearts." — Sean Thomas Dougherty, Author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys and The Second O of Sorrow
