Invisible Mending
The Best of C. K. Williams
by C. K. Williams
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Pub Date Mar 26 2024 | Archive Date Apr 08 2024
Description
The essential poetry of C. K. Williams, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
C. K. Williams (1936–2015), one of the most treasured American poets of the past century, was also one of the most surprising. From poem to poem, his voice would shift in register and style, yet a certain essence would remain: his conviction, his ethic, and his burning gaze. As William Deresiewicz wrote in The New York Times, “Williams’s scorching honesty has always been his calling card. His poetry proceeds not from a verbal impulse, not from a lyrical impulse, not even from a prophetic or visionary impulse, but from a moral impulse. Everything, in his work, is held up to the most exacting ethical scrutiny, beginning with the poet himself.”
Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams is the essential collection of the great poet’s work. Selected by his family and friends and with an introduction by the award-winning poet Alan Shapiro, this book charts Williams’s path from gifted young poet to his status as one of the most consequential poets of his—or any—generation. “If American poetry today is, as I believe it is, more diverse than ever,” Shapiro writes, “more open to any and all forms of life, more vitally engaged with a world external to the self and shared with others, it’s because of what the poems in this volume accomplished.” This collection distills the prolific poet’s body of work into one indispensable volume, through which one can trace the shifts and innovations that Williams’s work bore on American poetry.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"C.K. Williams is a masterful straight-speaker, and throughout his body of work the reader cannot help but feel his dynamic mind and astute irony. This collection of selected poems, Invisible Mending, introduced by Alan Shapiro, captures the reach and spirit of this one-of-kind American voice. And, in his longish, Whitman-like lines, C.K. is a witness who addresses head-on what glorifies and ails us. In his deep, personal voyage, from Lies to Catherine’s Laughter, this poet beckons to humanity, as he praises and laments, and the reader knows this is where one confronts basic truths in a world of divergences and modern shapechangers, where earthly encounters and everyday lives collide magically in the brave poetry of C.K. Williams." —Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374608392 |
| PRICE | $25.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 272 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Emily C, Reviewer
To start: I don't think I had truly read C. K. Williams before this.
At least, not with any depth or focused attention. His work had appeared sporadically in various anthologies I'd waded through during my degree and after, when I was trying to read "more broadly" (will I ever be able to stop trying?). A powerhouse of modern American poetry—especially recognized by his trademark long lines and almost prosaic style—Williams remains a hugely influential voice, and I knew it was beyond time to sit down with his work.
And I was truly blown away.
<i>Invisible Mending: The Best of C. K. Williams</i> is a stunning collection of pieces spanning the entirety of Williams' writing. As a collection, it encapsulates the spirit of the poet and his particular lens on the world: unflinching, egotistical (in a self-honest sense), and deeply insightful, veering into the psychoanalytical.
Throughout his work, Williams makes us look at the fears and loves and hopes and base desires behind our words and actions and lives. I will order a physical copy of this collection as soon as it releases so I can revisit these poems for as long as I can read.
"Because no one came, I slept again, / and dreamed that you were here with me, / snarled on me like wire, / tangled so closely to me that we were vines / or underbrush together, / or hands clenched."
- A Day for Anne Frank
<i>Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for early access to this collection!</i>
Ezra F, Librarian
C.K. Williams (Charlie, to his friends) wasn't just "one of the most distinguished poets of his generation," as Paul Muldoon said. He was so absolutely inventive that he basically invented a brand new poetic style, one marked by expansive lines of at least twenty syllables that allow space for characterization, description, philosophical investigation, and dramatic development. As Averill Curdy once wrote, Charlie "is one of the poets of his generation who is still singing, who hasn’t retreated into a pokey nostalgia or silence. His poems remain vital to me in their attempt to address the contemporary world, and I find the attempt itself moving." Today, thanks to posthumous collections such as this, both he and his work continue to be exactly that.
William F, Reviewer
Following in the tradition of poetry in the USA, beginning with Walt Whitman, Williams favors long lines, though not exclusively. His choice of line length allows him to create narratives as rich as short stories, while adapting a metaphysics of space in which he connects the physical with qualitative states as in his poems on the analytics of dreams and dreaming from his A Dream of Mind. His meditations on poets important to his work, the ones he’s read and the ones he knew, are pause for our consideration of the world of poetry and serious poets. His love poems tremble with a physicality in his descriptions of the body toward a deeper affinity to the sensations of Whitman’s body electric.
Selections from almost fifty years of poems of observations of strangers, nature, love, aging, and death, this is a volume essential to your poetry collection.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC
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