Phillip B. Williams is the author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary Award, and finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature and a Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle. He is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl and currently teaches literature and creative writing at Bennington College.
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Thief in the InteriorPoemsFrom"Love Story"
Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for
my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.
She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers
what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.
We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.
Thief in the Interior:Poems -
Thief in the InteriorPoemsFrom"Of Darker Ceremonies"
Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff pass,
a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes
every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack
on porches. Burnt-black pleats of joint-pressed lips
prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags
as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds
and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice.
Is there a tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike
shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger?
Thief in the Interior:Poems -
Thief in the InteriorPoemsFrom"He Loved Him Madly"
[Ten Crack Commandments]
It’s offensive, our most brilliant forced to pray
to getting paid, forced to spray or get sprayed.
It got so bad folks was scraping and sniffing
the ash off their knees. Cities full of prophets
that could only see as far as their own decease.
Thief in the Interior:Poems
“To experience [Phillip B. William’s] poetry is to encounter a lucid, unmitigated humanity, a voice for whom language is inadequate, yet necessarily grasped, shaped, and consumed. His devout and excruciating attention to the line and its indispensable music fuses his implacable understanding of words with their own shadows.” —Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Boston Review
“The seasoned reader of poetry will be impressed that Thief in the Interior is Phillip B. Williams’s first collection. His control of the line is masterful, and his syntax eschews, for the most part, direct or simple delivery of language, creating a formal and solemn tone that scores the emotional pitches of the book.” —Los Angeles Book Review
“[Williams] sings for the vanished, for the haunted, for the tortured, for the lost, for the place on the horizon where the little boat of the human body disappears in a wingdom of unending grace.” —The Best American Poetry
Selected Works
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Beauty and urgency meet in these poems, which fiercely seek new ways to protest, witness, and grieve the violence done daily to black men’s bodies. Williams mines fable in poems that follow the trajectory of thought—where and why it begins, how it changes. Williams’ poems are deeply alive to the sensuousness of both the world and the word. His language is rich, musical, and precise, his approach to form at once elegant and adventurous, his apprehension of the natural world radiantly strange. Williams builds a kind of gothic vision that is utterly his own; love and death are the lifespring of his verse. The collision of popular culture and mythical gods produces a mash-up of universal truths, mortality, and what it means to be human.