Jess Williard

Finalist, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize "Poems that lead us to striking insights and strange destinations." --Billy Collins The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard's poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, "where to be small and furious is enough."

Poems

Unmanly Grief

Chelsea Hodson

Jerald Walker

Dawn Davies

Jess Stoner

Catherine Carberry

Adam Ortman

Courtney Preiss

Alexandra Tanner

Dawna Kemper

The Austin Review. Built by Literati. True Things. And Lies. The Austin Review is an independent, nonprofit literary journal featuring contemporary fiction and creative, flash nonfiction. This fourth issue of The Austin Review features ten works.

The Austin Review

Jess Williard

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