Harold Whit Williams

A selection by the author of poems from his previously published collections: Waiting for the Fire to Go Out, Backmasking, Lost in the Telling, Red Clay Journal, My Heavens (FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize winner), and A Rain Ancestral. Some new poems are also included.

Poems written from the inside-out and the outside-in of the Old Country. An old country of not only quiet County Down pubs and gritty Belfast streets but also of childhood singsongs and snippets of last night's office dream. Fiddles and flutes, pipes and pints, liquor and loose-lipped language. Bone-and-blood ballads in formal and free verse.

Six-string and stompbox-themed stories culled from a bittersweet and simpler South, a grotesque and good-riddance South. Think Youth Fiction peppered with HBO cussin'. Not necessarily for the faint-of-heart, the high-minded literati, or maybe really anyone other than the writer himself.Harold Whit Williams is guitarist for the critically acclaimed rock band Cotton Mather, and he releases lo-fi home recordings as Daily Worker. He is a 2018 and 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee, and also recipient of the 2014 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize. His collection Backmasking was winner of the 2013 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize from Texas Review Press, and his latest, My Heavens, is available from FutureCycle Press. He lives in Austin, Texas.

WINNER OF THE 2020 FUTURECYCLE POETRY BOOK PRIZE. The quiet Southern skeptic and sly guitar-slinger Williams returns to form on this, his fifth poetry collection, MY HEAVENS. The very idea of a paradise-beyond sky or upon earth or within each moment-is poked and prodded with both sharp cynicism and wide-eyed wonder alike. Addressing grief, the day in/day out depictions are deeply distilled, the lines sober yet also playful, loose and languid. Nostalgia without sentimentality. Dreamlike visions without surrealism. These poems settle down across the kitchen table from a reader for a little give and take, a little what's it all about? "The transubstantiation, the utter mystery," Williams writes, "I swallow it all/And expect nothing in return."