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Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams’s consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (10/23/2025)
I finished the nonfiction book, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sara Wynn-Williams. My goodness, the immorality of some (well, most) of the people in that company, yikes! I'm now reading In the Time of Five Pumpkins by Alexander McCall Smith. I find this s...
-Lisa_B3
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (09-25-2025)
I missed commenting last week so I'm doubling up: All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert (heart wrenching, brutally unabashed as only Gilbert can pull off, raw truth at every step); Apostle's Cove by William Kent Krueger (a long, tedious, 10-hour listening journey to arrive at an abrupt dé...
-Sunny
What are you reading this week? (7/2/2025)
After finishing "Wild Dark Shore" by Charlotte McConaghy, I picked up "Booth" by Karen Joy Fowler. William Kent Krueger's "Ordinary Grace" is waiting to be re-read next (all for our public library's summer reading program for adults).
-Carol_Ann_Robb
"Williams at his best has soul: a perfect ear for the just right ending coupled with an exquisite eye for images that resonate. This book belongs on all poetry lovers' shelves." - Library Journal
"Starred Review. Exacting and impassioned, Williams adds another electrifying and important collection to his extraordinary canon." - Booklist
"Starred Review. In his first new collection since his monumental Collected Poems, Pulitzer-winner and septuagenarian Williams delivers his best book in a decade, and one of his best outright." - Publishers Weekly
This information about Wait was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
C.K. Williams's books of poetry include Repair (FSG, 2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and The Singing (FSG, 2003), winner of the National Book Award. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of the year in France.
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