“These poems move with unhurried purposefulness so that you trust the seething urgency and deliberateness of lines like ‘memory is a language that’s survived its skin’ or the painfully earned benediction and expression of resigned hope in ‘whatever finally breaks me, I cannot refuse it.’ Splendid poetry, never seeking to pander in its accessibility, but always, nonetheless, as plainspoken as each complex idea will allow.”—Kwame Dawes, professor of English at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editor of Prairie Schooner

“In John Sibley Williams’s new book Skin Memory, a child inherits an earth haunted by the violence of the past—landscape of his own skin. What then, identity? Skin memory, as opposed to blood memory, is porous. In these poems Williams feels himself across its divide, experiencing “the shrapnel seeing leaves behind in things,” and does so in language mesmerizing as “the slow pulse oaks bring to the forest.” I don’t often encounter poems deep enough to settle into that are, at the same time, this deeply unsettling.”—Melissa Kwasny, author of Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

“Both imaginative and lucid, Skin Memory offers a rich cartography of our world as we’ve made it, a world of overlapping skins (human, animal, earth) that caress and wound and scar one another. Here there is no false nature/culture binary, but earth as palimpsest—a body made up of bodies, histories, and dreams of the future. Like the tattered fragments of Borges’s Map of the Empire, Williams’s world is always charged with mystery alongside human desire and folly: wherever our endeavors mark the landscape, there too the scrub grass peeks through.”—Sarah Rose Nordgren, author of Darwin’s Mother