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Dancing on the X by Todd Williams

$22.99

 

How often do we get a book that both has something important to say and is yet a joy to read? Not often, yet here is one of those books. In Dancing on the X, Todd Williams gives us sharp commentary on today’s America, but also intimate poems about family, his boyhood, the pandemic and a sense of place. It is beautifully written, with Williams’ grace, wit and joy of language unifying poems ranging from the cosmos to road kill, the Beatles to professional wrestling. In any of it, we’re in good hands with Williams’ strong, masterly writing.

–Dana Yost, author of Grace and In Your Head

 

“Whether he is doing it on purpose or not, with a predetermined plan or otherwise, Todd Williams in this collection of poems is a real master excavator of the past. In one poem after another, he succeeds in taking us along with him to the land of ‘Things Past’ and the kingdom of ‘No More’. But he’s not totally overwhelmed by the past. The present with its details and intricacies can also be felt and seen in many poems.”

 —Abdulwahab Abuzaid, author of A Lonely Supper for a Lonely Soul (2020) and Don’t Let the Night Alone (2022).

 

 

 

 

Dancing on the X

by Todd Williams

Full-length, paper

979-8-89990-169-0

2025

Dancing on the X traces the path of perhaps one of the most misunderstood demographics of our times — Generation X –from latch key childhoods to slacker young adulthood to their eventual status of the last generation to have truly lived in the pre- and post-internet generations. Comic books, pop music, parenthood, the pandemic, and loss provide a landscape for this poetic journey that shows a generation as likely to debate strongly the merits of Styx vs. The Beatles as it is politics — and continues to search for the answers in everything from a new tattoo to a second-hand pair of socks. #poetry #GenX #AmericaMaybe

Todd Williams is a former South Dakota journalist who worked in newspapers for 25 years before moving to work in the Middle East. He began writing poetry following his father’s death in 2017, publishing his first poems in late 2019. Since, he has since published a number of poems in various online and print magazines and anthologies. In 2021, Williams won the South Dakota State Poetry Society’s annual chapbook for his “Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.”

 

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