Description

ISBN: 9781930781603
Binding: Tradepaper
Pub date: January, 2022

Cover art by Hagar Vardimon

Advance praise for Scale Model of a Country at Dawn:

“With an impressive mastery of sound matched only by his alchemical imagery, Williams guides readers along mythic highways, above oceans, and towards the reimagining of a bridge no one remembers. To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams’s words are that convincing. Recasting home as conch shell, as ghost house, and as fire, we learn that we are held together by the tensile strength of our own narrative. I’ve circled and underlined lines on nearly every poem in Scale Model of a Country at Dawn. This is a book you’ll want to read, and then turn to the first poem to enter again. Even if no one is safe from the wolves in our hearts, John Sibley Williams helps us live within these contradictions.”

—Susan Rich, author of Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems

“In Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, John Sibley Williams illuminates a world that while filled with tragedy and ruin is likewise blooming with life and celebration. Here, we navigate the ‘new constellations’ and ‘vanquished sky’ after a friend’s suicide; we contemplate the absence of earth and wonder if it can be ‘filled with prayers’ again; and in between the oncology ward and the wildfires raging in Northern California, we see the quiet moments worth spending time with: a father witnessing his children coming into their own, a house in need of repair but still providing shelter, and the plethora of American landscapes where Williams’s speakers have a chance to reflect and be themselves. Although in the course of this collection we may come to realize that there are ‘far fewer gods’ than we thought before, Williams’s poems are a gift that offer us something to believe in again and again.”

—Esteban Rodriguez, author of (Dis)placement and The Valley

About the Author

John Sibley Williams is the author of six collections, including The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). A twenty-six-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. Previous publishing credits include Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

John Sibley Williams is the winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Book Award for Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (CPR, January, 2022)