LOW
(Bloodaxe Books, 27th May 2021)
My second collection is an exploration of identity in the face of loss. At its heart is a series of poems about the desolation of miscarriage. These poems try to understand the many different means we use to come closer to articulating, and avoiding, experience.
Drawing on the language of comedy, improvisation, drag and clown, Low interrogates humour’s role in enacting the possibility of change.
Purchase information on the Bloodaxe Books website.
BEAR(Bloodaxe Books, 25th May 2017)
My first full poetry collection of poems was selected as one of the Telegraph's 50 Best Books of 2017, where it was described as an "inventive, goofy, oddly moving debut".
You will find more about it on the Bloodaxe website, but here are some ludicrously nice things Luke Kennard and Annie Freud have said about it:
‘Chrissy Williams is my new favourite poet. These poems are as close and intimate as a bear breathing down your neck, about to take you in its arms or tear you limb from limb; as strange and unexpected as a bear playing the piano and as beautiful and inexplicable as love.’ – Luke Kennard
‘In spite of its almost absurdist character and apparent playfulness, Chrissy Williams's Bear is a collection of poems that deal with all that is most serious in human life. From start to finish, these wonderfully various, entertaining and original poems speak the language of compassion, intimacy and faith.’ – Annie Freud
Purchase information on the Bloodaxe Books website.
As Editor:
Over the Line:An Introduction to Poetry Comics
(Sidekick Books, September 2015)
"I really can't recommend this venture highly enough" – Alan Moore
More than 70 pages of new poetry comics and a substantial first section that introduces this exciting hybrid mediuim.
The book has had a few reviews, like Down the Tube's review of one of the launches, Broken Frontier's review, Sabotage's review, or London Grip's. We also got an honorable mention on Forbidden Planet's "Best of 2015" and a mention on World Literature Today. There was also a long and very positive review in Poetry London that's available in print only.
Poetry London said: "Williams and Humberstone have not collected the work that slotted into their pre-conceived idea of what poetry comics could be; rather, through their active participation in a burgeoning scene, they have encouraged poets and artists to define those ideas themselves. Their introduction is an invitation to expand that definition."
Purchase information on the Sidekick Books website.
(Digital copies available at a discount via Sequential.)
Pamphlets:
First of ManyA four page, three colour riso-printed poem comic collaboration with Tom Humberstone. Originally created for the StAnza Poetry Festival.The pamphlet is printed on thick A4 birchwood card-stock by Out of The Blueprint in Edinburgh.Limited print-run of 100 copies. Will not be reprinted.
To purchase from Tom's website: https://www.tomhumberstone.com/shop/firstofmany
(If A Leaf Falls Press, Spring 2016)
A short pamphlet working with the notion of putting a blog on paper, unclickable hyperlinks and all, with a little help from William Carlos Williams (in case you're wondering "why all the references to Nantucket?").
http://samriviere.com/index.php?/together/if-a-leaf-falls-press/
Seven Poems(HappenStance Press, Autumn 2014)
Seven poems, five drawn from my sold-out HappenStance pamphlet Flying into the Bear, and two new poems. Produced for the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival 2014 and available via the HappenStance website.
Contact HappenStance Press for details.
(if p then q, March 2014)
A sequence of 100 epigraphs, each of which could stand in for an individual poem, as well combining to form a single sequence in a hundred voices. Featured on BBC Radio 3's The Verb.
To purchase from the publisher's website: If P Then Q shop
"Chrissy Williams has taken advantage of a massive range of influences in order to create something fascinating." - Sarah Gonnet
"Clearly an interest in popular culture and the advent of the internet is combined here with a more 'high-art' tendency though the barriers appear to have totally broken down..." - Steve Spence, Stride
"Chrissy Williams is opening a new space for British experimental poetry ... not only making it new: she is making it vital." - Marcus Slease, Shearsman
(Sidekick Books, Autumn 2013)
A collaboration with artist Howard Hardiman which fuses Murder, She Wrote with Twin Peaks in poetry and comics. It asks the question: "What if Angela was the real murderer all along?" Some more information here.
To purchase from the publisher's website:
http://sidekickbooks.com/booklab/books/angela/
This pamphlet was launched on 16th October 2013, the date of real-life Angela Lansbury's 88th birthday which was celebrated in style. There are a few words about the pamphlet here on the Poetry School's website. You will find assorted photos from the launch on Facebook. There is an interview about the creative process on the Spindle website. Some extracts from which were previously published as a concrete poetry p.o.w. broadside.
"The pamphlet gives a feeling of deep unease alongside a sense of psychological turmoil mired in absurdity. Shining through all this is Angela’s light-hearted personality making this comic a source of both stark beauty and subversive pleasure." - Eric Anderson, Lonesome Reader
(HappenStance, April 2013)
"the most energetic, delightful collection you will read this year" TLS
A poetry pamphlet shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards in 2013. You can read some sample poems and reviews by clicking here.
http://www.happenstancepress.com/index...
From reviews:
"The most energetic, delightful collection you will read this year" - Andrew McCulloch, TLS
"Sharply intelligent, these poems seem scattered and watchful" - Alison Prince, The North
"an atmosphere of the ecstatic, seen in sudden lateral movement, unexpected surges of the psyche, pleasurable and spontaneous" - Afric McGlinchey Sabotage Reviews
"Flying into the Bear is charged with an emotional gravity" - Nick Murray Annexe Magazine
"a pleasure in pluralism" - Richard O'Brien Poetry London
"Williams works very well with different forms" - Charles Whalley, Under the Radar
"quickly and mystifyingly turns into something much more alarming" - Thomas Ovans London Grip
"delights us with the unexpected" - John Field
"Chrissy Williams’s poems are full of playful possibilities" - Emma Lee
"clever, innovative and ultra-modern, but also personal and warm" - Angelina Ayers Antiphon
"Fasten your seatbelts. Something powerful is taking off here." - Christie Williamson Sphinx
murder she wrote(p.o.w., April 2012)
"a gift of layering the serious and preposterous" Chris McCabe
A concrete poetry broadside which unfolds to poster size, part of the p.o.w. series published by Antonio Claudio Carvalho, inspired by Hansjorg Mayer's futura series from the 1960s.
Email me for purchasing info.
"Chrissy Williams is one of the few poets who've emerged over the past few years who gives me that static-suspense of wondering what she'll come up with next. Williams has a gift of layering the serious and preposterous which leaves you unsure if you should be dancing with the Muppets or calling for the undertaker. Her gift is in making what might be just preposterous in other poets' work seem inevitable in hers - why hasn't anyone written a violent love poem to Angela Lansbury before? This is a resounding end to p.o.w. series 2, melding poetry that is precisely tuned and mysterious with the visual in a way that it would be hard to imagine the world without." - Chris McCabe
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| Overview of the broadside. |
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| p.1 of the broadside |
(Soaring Penguin, February 2012)
"unusual and refreshing" Mslexia
24 prose poems illustrated by a variety of comics artists (John Aggs, Lizz Lunney, Meiron Jones, Sarah McIntyre, Ellen Lindner, Laurenn McCubbin, Julia Scheele and many more). Magical realism, without the magic.
To purchase from the publisher's website:
http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/...
From reviews:
Mslexia: "unusual and refreshing"
Tears in the Fence: "familiar truths presented with wry humour"
Sabotage Reviews: "an accessibility which belies its confident ingenuity"
You can preview some pages from the book over on Peony Moon.
The Jam Trap
(Silkworms Inc, 2010)
An online chapbook containing 10 poems which form the basis of what went on to become the full Jam Trap pamphlet.
To read on the publisher's website:
http://www.silkwormsink.com/v1/chapbook_19.html
Essays & Interviews:
"Language as Experience"
Review: Astrid Alben, Matthew Caley, Vahni Capildeo
Poetry London #96 (Summer 2020)
From the introduction:
Astrid Alben’s second collection, Plainspeak, is a book of delicious paradoxes. It reads as free verse – in the sense that it uses no regular metre or rhyme and has lines of uneven length – and yet each poem is shackled to the same eight-line couplet structure, making it distinctly unfree...
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"Rooting for Language"
An Interview with Matthew and Michael Dickman
Poetry London (Autumn 2016)
Extract from the interview (full interview available on the Poetry London website):
CW: Matthew, I have a quote here from you here, from Poetry News. You talked about writing poems as ‘an experiment in making meaning out of the acid-trip, non-language lightshow of my inner life’. How much do you trust language to communicate these non-verbal experiences?
Matthew: I trust it absolutely in a way, because I know that language constantly fails. And I know I’ve constantly failed as a human being, so I relate to language. You know, I relate to the frustration of language to actually say what is being felt. This is something my brother touched on, but poetry, I believe, is the literary genre that most quickly can pull human beings into an intimate sensibility. And through things like metaphor and simile, it can take the sort of rubble that great love and great grief make out of language, and can rebuild it in some semblance that allows us space to understand it. Even if we don’t understand it intellectually, we understand it emotionally. I mean – the language is just gonna fail, you know. There’s no way any of the poems in this book clearly articulate my brother Michael’s and my grief over Darin’s suicide. But, like human beings, they attempt to, and I really love that attempt – like watching a really bad sports team. Language, like, you root for it, even though you know in the end, it’s not going to win. There’s something human – I think that’s the thing. There’s something so human about language.
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"What is a Poem?"
Review: Emma Hammond, Adam Crothers, Andrew Shields, Rosie Shepperd
Poetry London (Summer 2016)
From the introduction:
These
four collections are all confident, each with their own diverse
approaches to the page. Some are more or less traditional, more or less
challenging, political, playful, philosophical... and they’re all very
different in how they treat what a poem might actually be...
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"Balls, Breaths and Borogoves"
Review: Tom Chivers, Claire Crowther, Mario Petrucci
Poetry London (Autumn 2015)
From the introduction:
The poetry in Tom Chivers’ Dark Islands has a lot of balls. I don’t mean in terms of specific reference (though there are some), I mean in the heady juxtapositions of historical reference, digital life, garish alliteration, crisis (both economic and existential), along with bawdy humour, relentless similes, deft leaps in register, and moments of eloquent profundity.
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"Making Culture, Not Curating It"
Review: Ten - The New Wave; My Voice - A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre
Poetry London (Spring 2015)
From the introduction:
Paul Muldoon said that anthology introductions are generally 'an attempt by a despot to account for his or her own despotism' (Introduction to Faber Book of Beasts). I can't think of any statement further in feel from the aims and ambitions of the anthologies Ten: The New Wave and My Voice, each of which is the product of months and months of work done by a specialist poetry organization. They are building poetic culture from the ground up, rather than selecting from a pre-existing pool of published work - making poetry, not just curating it...
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Review: Literary Pocket Book Micro Series
Poetry Wales 50:3 (Winter 2015)
From the introduction:
A padded envelope spills seven brightly coloured miniature folded booklets over my desk in a glorious fluorescent mess...
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Miremur Stellam: Poetry and Comics
Poetry Wales 50:1 (Summer 2014)
From the introduction:
Reading
more, trying to unpack the language of comics, the language of panel
transitions and the blanks left for the reader's mind to fill in, I bega
to see more and more similarities between comics and poetry...
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16 Bears: Chrissy Williams on Chrissy Williams
The Rialto no. 78 (Autumn 2013)
From the introduction:
BEARS! Charging down the hill at full speed, joyfully haired and honeyed! Bears, bears, bears flooding everywhere, with every complication of life written into them! Easy, isn't it? Words are easy to type. But listen now, listen if you will, this is what the bears have to say:
BEAR THE FIRST
I remember nursery rhymes and children's songs, and books where the words were written big. Words were big because they were important.
BEAR THE SECOND
I am half-Italian. My mother is Italian but I was brought up in England. My first words were in Italian, although they were quickly beaten out of me, metaphorically, by Scottish/Welsh grandparents. Lots of the nursery rhymes which have stuck with me are Italian ones.
Ma che bello il pappagallo
Tutto verde e l’occhio giallo
Cosa fai? Cosa vuoi?
Parli, parli, parli, parli...
Words were for singing along to, for recitation, for enjoying: a way of hearing music even when there was no music playing...
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On Chris McCabe's THE RESTRUCTURE
Tears in the Fence no. 57 (Summer 2013)
From the introduction:
"Look, Chris, look — I’m reviewing your book! I’ve already told them they can’t trust me, that I’ll be hideously biased, seeing as we work together at the Poetry Library and spend far too much time out drinking together, talking rubbish, poems, things, but here we are. I’m not afraid to rave about your wonderful book. I just wish I could do it independently of our friendship..."
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From Page to Stage
Poetry Review (Autumn 2012)
From the introduction:
“Risk. Audiences love it. Audiences don’t know the rules. Because there aren’t any.”
– Poet Hannah Silva on writing for theatre
"Poetry is migrating into performative territory – the theatre. This may seem like a natural progression, or regression, considering poetry’s roots in an oral tradition stretching back millennia. And yet poetry in the theatre is often still perceived as novelty, as a watering down of text, as adding a layer of artifice to something which should be connected with the eye, in silence, in privacy. These assumptions lack insight into the innovative ways in which poets are taking their words to the stage, and the intensity with which poetries may be experienced in a totally different form..."
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Antigonick — what the hell it is and why it matters
Hand + Star (Summer 2012)
From the introduction:
"Questions, questions, so many questions. "Why is Antigone a horse?" is one, but we'll get to that. Not only is Antigonick the first of Anne Carson's translations to combine text with visual elements but — described variously as poetry, as a comic-book, a play text, translation, artists' book, objet d’art — it's also the first of her books to vault more genre boundaries than a literary showjumper..."
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Some Thoughts About Poetry and Comics
The Rialto website (Spring 2012)
From the introduction:
"economy of line is paramount
Comics are at their most successful when the maximum effect is produced by every line and unnecessary lines are eliminated. This is an artistic choice distinct to the employment of a naive or simplistic style..."
Read the full piece here.
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Ways of Seeing Dancing Chickens: on Robert Frost and The Muppet Show
Anon issue 8 (Autumn 2011)
From the introduction:
"How a classic Muppets sketch from the 70s poses very contemporary questions about how popular culture approaches poetry.
Snow falls. A horse-drawn sleigh pulls into a wintery scene. Fozzie Bear clears his throat and begins a dramatic recital of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He enunciates with the deliberate devotion of a six- year-old child, until Gonzo bursts onstage with a catchy tango, a colourful sombrero and a troupe of dancing chickens. He shouts:
Olé!
Arriba!
Enchilada!
and the Frostian idyll is overrun. After several interruptions Fozzie submits, dons his own sombrero and ends by singing the poem in time to the music. It’s a simple and delightful Muppet Show sketch that needs no explication, and yet a few straightforward questions such as “Why this poem?”, “Why this song?” or “Why chickens?” point to an insightful enquiry into how poetry should be presented to modern television audiences. Best of all, Gonzo’s seemingly random stage invasion turns out to be based on a true story about Robert Frost..."
Full article can be found by clicking here.
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Model Publisher or Pirate? R. A. Caton and the Fortune Press
Hand + Star (October 2010) Archived page here.
From the introduction:
"R. A. Caton's legacy is ambiguous at best. He published the debuts of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Cecil Day Lewis as well as books by Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and many others. Some of the editions published by the Fortune Press between 1924 and 1971 can fetch upwards of £5,000 today and Caton himself, an independent book publisher who generally worked alone, died an exceedingly rich man. On the other hand he also dabbled in exploitative vanity publishing, was found guilty of obscenity following a criminal trial and had a general aversion to paying his writers (most notably Larkin and Amis). Is it possible to reconcile the more dynamic elements of Caton's list with these failings, or are the Fortune Press's achievements irreparably tainted by the roguish publisher himself?"
Anthologies:
Staying Human (Bloodaxe Books, 2020)
On Paper: An Unofficial Love Island Poetry Anthology (SPAM Press, 2018)
Cold Fire: Poetry Inspired by David Bowie (Rialto, 2017)
New Boots and Pantisocracies (Smokestack Books, 2016)
Poetics of the Archive (Newcastle Poetry Festival, 2015)
Funny Ha-Ha, Funny Peculiar: a book of strange and comic poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2015)
Lives Beyond Us: Poems and Essays on the Film Reality of Animals (Sidekick Books, 2015)
Cast: The Poetry Business Book of New Contemporary Poets (Poetry Business, 2014)
Other Room 6 (Other Room Press, 2014)
Double Bill: Poems Inspired by Popular Culture (Red Squirrel Press, 2014)
Mount London: Ascents in the Vertical City (Penned in the Margins, 2014)
Coin Opera 2 (Sidekick Books, 2013)
Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives (5) (Egg Box, 2013)
Modern Poets on Viking Poetry (University of Cambridge, 2013)
Birdbook 2 (Sidekick Books, 2012)
Sci-Fi Poetry anthology Where Rockets Burn Through (Penned in the Margins, 2012)
Adventures in Form (Penned in the Margins, 2012)
Oxfam Book of Young British Poets (Cinnamon Press, 2011)
Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Publishing, 2011)
Herbarium 2011, anthology of poems for Urban Physic Garden
Starry Rhymes: 85 Years of Allen Ginsberg 2011, anthology
Birdbook 1: Towns, Parks, Gardens & Woodland (Sidekick Books, 2011)
Stop Sharpening Your Knives (4) (Egg Box Publishing, 2011)
The Shuffle Anthology 2010-2011
Korsakoff's Paper Chain (Sidekick Books, 2010)
Obakarama (Sidekick Books, 2009)
Coin Opera (Sidekick Books, 2009)
Magazines:
Poetry London #98, Spring 2021
POETRY, March 2019
Copper Nickel #27, Fall 2018
Test Centre #7, 2016
Magma 66, The comedy issue, 2016
The Rialto #86, 2016
Poetry Wales #51.3, 2016
Test Centre #6, 2015
New Boots and Pantisocracies, 2015
Ink Brick #2, Nov 2014
The Rialto in Autumn 2014
The Rialto in Autumn 2013
Poetry London in Summer 2013
Poems in Which issue 3 in June 2013
The Scotsman 18th May 2013
Long Poem Magazine issue 9 in May 2013
Tears in the Fence no. 56 (January 2013)
The Rialto in Spring 2012
Under the Radar late 2011/early 2012
Fuselit Contraption issue (Sidekick Books)
Rising issue 53, edited by Tim Wells
Horizon Review issue 5, edited by Katy Evans-Bush
The Rialto issue 69, edited by Michael Mackmin (featured in Nathan Hamilton's "Young Poets" feature)
South Bank Poetry issue 7 edited by Peter Ebsworth
Rising issue 50, edited by Tim Wells
Eyewear Todd Swift blog
Fuselit "Mars" issue edited by Jon Stone and Kirsten Irving
The Quiet Feather edited by Taissa Csáky, Dominic Hall and Tim Major
Orphan Leaf Review edited by James Paul Wallis
Eclipse edited by Elizabeth Boyd
The Rialto issue 53, edited by Michael Mackmin
Dial 174 edited by Joseph Hemmings
Poetry and Comics Collaborative Anthologies:
Monthly anthologies of experiments created by our informal poetry and comics workshop group. Click here to read them all for free on Issuu.
There is a poetry and comics online scrapbook here.
