Review of Thief in the Interior by Phillip B. Williams
- blueshiftjournal
- Jan 5, 2016
- 2 min read
by katherine frain, poetry editor
Thief in the Interior, Phillip B. Williams’ new book of poetry from Alice James, is a complex journey through different technical forms and moments of life. Some of those moments are Williams’; some belong to others, ghosts who are named and given life within Williams’ words. It was a complex work to write, and it’s a complicated one to review. While Thief of the Interior is brims with soul, both owned and borrowed, it’s difficult at times to see what's fresh and new.
There are moments in Thief in the Interior where Williams’ work is lush, cascading – "Eleggua and Eshu Ain’t the Same," for example, would ring like a bell if you tapped it. In the back 10% of the book, the place where Williams seems to truly hit his stride, "Eleggua and Eshu" is dense like dark chocolate, deep and worth it, and striking in a way many poems closer to the beginning of the book don’t seem to be. In a poetry world where writers and readers grapple daily with the distillation of complex lives into an inherently choppy narrative, most of Thief in the Interior seems disappointingly familiar. I couldn’t count the number of times the moon was mentioned on both hands.
There were poems where Williams absolutely shattered whatever notions I formed about his work; his poems following the true-life murders of several young black men were gorgeous if horrifying in form and detail. After reading the section of the poem "Witness" conveyed from the point of view of the duffel bag that carried Rashawn Brazell’s dismembered body, I had to take a personal moment to touch the joints I had, to make sure they were still intact. Then Thief lapsed into honeyed javelins and snow owls again.
Certainly out there are readers who don’t share my vicious hatred for the moon (if every poet who wrote about it planted a flag there, would it still be visible? would landing spacecraft immediately be impaled on our metaphors?). Williams, after all, boasts an impressive publication list from within the book; poems seen everywhere from Callaloo to Kenyon. And there can be a charm in images we know made over again (the moon, returning, its new face).
But to me, the many iterations echo hollow, especially when coupled with some of the technical choices in this work. I can rarely throw myself behind single-word lines; “Maybe/” in "Apotheosis" offers me nothing but an overstatement of tension, working the moment so tightly that it breaks and I’m left frustrated instead of concerned. The visual poetry, when tried, seems to fall short of the astonishing effect created by Kleon and the Humament. Some ending lines seemed perplexed by their place at the end of the poem.
Thief in the Interior is an astonishingly ambitious work, and one that succeeds best when its wires dangle out. Although I couldn’t ever submerge myself in it entirely, I’ll be looking forward to what Williams produces next – as, it seems, will those at the accomplished journals he’s delivered work to, and those he will undoubtedly conquer in the future.
