Like an Empty House by Kristine Williams

 

With lyrical delicacy and a gardener’s (not to mention a poet’s) patient and close attention, Williams fills her house with the complex variety of what we might call the everyday things of this world. It is large enough to hold the experience of being a woman (poet, teacher, mother, wife, gardener, animal lover): the sweet and the bitter, as well as the bittersweet. There is tenderness and sensuality here, awakening all our senses. There are poems that will make you shiver. Williams’ sinuous lines lead us to her door, and invite us in. Enter. Your visit will be well-rewarded.

–Wendy McVicker, author of the dancer’s notes and Sliced Dark; Athens (OH) Poet Laureate.

 

Kristine Williams’ chapbook Like an Empty House is a love story, an ode to her partner in life (and crime!), Our fingers lace together/ and the world falls into place. You may think you know where this story is going but oh, reader, you do not. This is no ordinary partner, no, but one who hops out of a warm bed in the middle of a thunderstorm, climbs to the roof to clear the downspout, to stop the incessant dripping that has kept the lovers from sleep. In the midst of raising children, pets and themselves, this love, instead of cooling as many do, heats up through the years, Your breath tickles as you spill your flying dreams into me,/ fill me./ Chase away the doubt. There are trials, yes, but also astonishments, treasures woven within each poem, to be discovered and envied, each of them Wanting light./ Wanting only/ to breathe.

 —Kari Gunter-Seymour, Ohio Poet Laureate, author of A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen

 

Kris Williams’ poems make art from daily life, an accomplishment that looks much easier than it actually is. Her poems are concise in imagery, vivid, quiet but strong. The speaker is authentic, and that lends real beauty to her work. The reader can’t help but trust her: mother, wife, lover, daughter. The poems do more than re-create a moment in the garden digging bulbs, in the kitchen with her husband watching birds. Here, the ordinary becomes transcendent,  the poems more than the sum of their parts.

 

The quiet poems open the reader to the beauty of the natural world,  “unfurling like fiddleheads.” With the speaker we experience the worry of motherhood: “what instinct draws you here?”

 

These intimate gestures of daily life, “…as I pull my chin down into the collar of my coat,”

draw the reader in and wreck us. “I couldn’t breathe….the feeling of falling up into this endless blackness.”

 

Williams’ poetry invites us to the beauty and grief of our daily lives and the seasons (metaphoric and real)  that bring us home, urging us to “turn inward and wait/just wait.”

–Jane Ann Fuller,  co-author, Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize,

 

In Like an Empty House, Kristine Williams shows us the power of tactility, the ways in which accidental and purposeful touch can shape our experience with the world and with each other.  Anxiety is a rock thrown at a bird, memory is a blade, fear must be unwrapped, and the sensual is represented by a voice soothing an ache.  In fact, all of these poems illustrate Williams’ exquisite talent for exploring worldly and philosophical matters through sensory perception.  In this way, we don’t gain insight through faith, but we gain faith through every touch, and in every way we can experience the world.  To add to this, Williams uses a lush but common language that allows the reader to feel both the emotional and the intellectual impact of her work at the same time.  Like an Empty House is a collection that will make you feel each and every word.

–David B. Prather, author of We Were Birds