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As One Fire Consumes Another
Winner of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize, selected by Vandana Khanna.
What happens when metaphysics and social critique meet? Poetry that has to find a new form to express the tension it embodies. John Sibley Williams’ newspaper-like columns in AS ONE FIRE CONSUMES ANOTHER do just that. Here, transcendent vision and trenchant social insight meet, wrestle, and end up revitalizing one another.
What happens when metaphysics and social critique meet? Poetry that has to find a new form to express the tension it embodies. John Sibley Williams’ newspaper-like columns in AS ONE FIRE CONSUMES ANOTHER do just that. Here, transcendent vision and trenchant social insight meet, wrestle, and end up revitalizing one another.
- GenresPoetry
86 pages, Paperback
First published April 2, 2019
2 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
About the author
John Sibley Williams
29 books117 followersJohn Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 27, 2021
Review: As One Fire Consumer Another by John Sibley Williams
It is a rare gift to entangle opposing emotions or intellectual treatises into a unifying work of art, but that is exactly what John Sibley Williams does in his 2018 Orison Poetry Prize winning collection of poems, AS ONE FIRE CONSUMES ANOTHER. So many of the poems exquisitely move down the page in both despair and resistance, which leads a reader to understand the struggle of the human condition, whether political or familial, personal or cultural. Consider this passage from "Of Milk & Honey:”
"…But isn’t
experience merely what men call
their mistakes? The rest is history or
myth or rinse & repeat. We are an
unsettlable people. To have made it
this far yet still stare vacantly at our
own hands like exorcised ghosts. To
repeat into belief: I have no home,
then to take it with us wherever we
go."
You can feel the energy in these words rocking back and forth, shifting uncomfortably between tenderness and neglect. In fact, this can be felt even in the structure of the poems overall. Every single poem is right and left justified on the page in columns, almost a dispassionate representation, a way to deliver “the news,” so to speak. At first glance, this constantly repeated form may seem distant, cold, and lacking in passion, but the opposite is true. In fact, the passion that bounces around in the prison of form comes from the life that keeps banging around inside those bars of constriction. Every poem in this collection is like a jar full of fireflies. We know the sensible thing to do is to unscrew the lid and let these sparks of life fly back into the darkness of the world. But what we desire and so often do is keep them by the bedside where they falter and die. Yes, it is the kind of struggle we find in Williams’ work. And it is up to us, the readers Willams so richly deserves, to make that difficult decision, to savor each poem while remembering it has a life of its own.
Mr. Williams writes in the poem, “Harm:”
"Whatever it is, we need more of it."
Such desire runs throughout the poems in this collection. Whether it is love, or riches, or compassion, or whatever we are sure we need, this one line sings at least two melodies. The first song we might hear is one of taking all of the pleasures we can consume, of reveling in the joys of this world. The second song is one that underlies the first one, perhaps more insidious, that counterpoints with our greed. Mr. Williams’ ability to create the language, the phrasing to live in both worlds at once, is simply a matter of brilliance.
I cannot stress enough what a delight it is to have read these poems. I think you, too, will be enchanted by this magnificent collection.
It is a rare gift to entangle opposing emotions or intellectual treatises into a unifying work of art, but that is exactly what John Sibley Williams does in his 2018 Orison Poetry Prize winning collection of poems, AS ONE FIRE CONSUMES ANOTHER. So many of the poems exquisitely move down the page in both despair and resistance, which leads a reader to understand the struggle of the human condition, whether political or familial, personal or cultural. Consider this passage from "Of Milk & Honey:”
"…But isn’t
experience merely what men call
their mistakes? The rest is history or
myth or rinse & repeat. We are an
unsettlable people. To have made it
this far yet still stare vacantly at our
own hands like exorcised ghosts. To
repeat into belief: I have no home,
then to take it with us wherever we
go."
You can feel the energy in these words rocking back and forth, shifting uncomfortably between tenderness and neglect. In fact, this can be felt even in the structure of the poems overall. Every single poem is right and left justified on the page in columns, almost a dispassionate representation, a way to deliver “the news,” so to speak. At first glance, this constantly repeated form may seem distant, cold, and lacking in passion, but the opposite is true. In fact, the passion that bounces around in the prison of form comes from the life that keeps banging around inside those bars of constriction. Every poem in this collection is like a jar full of fireflies. We know the sensible thing to do is to unscrew the lid and let these sparks of life fly back into the darkness of the world. But what we desire and so often do is keep them by the bedside where they falter and die. Yes, it is the kind of struggle we find in Williams’ work. And it is up to us, the readers Willams so richly deserves, to make that difficult decision, to savor each poem while remembering it has a life of its own.
Mr. Williams writes in the poem, “Harm:”
"Whatever it is, we need more of it."
Such desire runs throughout the poems in this collection. Whether it is love, or riches, or compassion, or whatever we are sure we need, this one line sings at least two melodies. The first song we might hear is one of taking all of the pleasures we can consume, of reveling in the joys of this world. The second song is one that underlies the first one, perhaps more insidious, that counterpoints with our greed. Mr. Williams’ ability to create the language, the phrasing to live in both worlds at once, is simply a matter of brilliance.
I cannot stress enough what a delight it is to have read these poems. I think you, too, will be enchanted by this magnificent collection.
March 23, 2019
It has been a privilege for me to work with John to help publicize this book. To date, one of my favorite takes on the collection comes from a pre-publication article in Poets & Writers magazine:
"In his third poetry collection, As One Fire Consumes Another, forthcoming from Orison Books in April, John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. 'The poems speak of death and cultural roles, privilege and otherness, the little boxes we place one another in, and our often violent attempts to escape them,' Williams says. The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence. 'My children are learning all wars / begin with belief,' Williams writes in one poem. 'We are less afraid of the dark / inside than of all the light,' he writes in another.
The full article, which highlights some of the literary journals that originally published poems in the collection, is available at https://www.pw.org/content/literary_m....
"In his third poetry collection, As One Fire Consumes Another, forthcoming from Orison Books in April, John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. 'The poems speak of death and cultural roles, privilege and otherness, the little boxes we place one another in, and our often violent attempts to escape them,' Williams says. The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence. 'My children are learning all wars / begin with belief,' Williams writes in one poem. 'We are less afraid of the dark / inside than of all the light,' he writes in another.
The full article, which highlights some of the literary journals that originally published poems in the collection, is available at https://www.pw.org/content/literary_m....
June 9, 2019
John Sibley Williams is a poet who seemingly writes from memory those invisible psalms that cast language as a font and word as the codename of one who’s kept a diary of the search for yours. As such, the collection As One Fire Consumes Another knows what to say after it says it while liberating from footnote how the old might guide the current into outlining those shapes bent on being dumbstruck by the new . No findable thing need make a sound and the already lit won’t court what glows. No toy beast misses its childhood master and if a pin drops it is heard only by the late soul who’s left tapping on a calculator in the shadow of a cross. Both instructional and sudden, intentional and evoked, these irreplaceably devoured poems gain ground in heaven by way of their broken earth and airbrush with a slow permanence the godspeed our yearning squanders.
June 12, 2019
John Sibley Williams’ As One Fire Consumes Another presents a familiar world full of burnings carried out on both the grand and intimate scale. I love the way the newspaper-like columns of prose poetry in his work provide a social critique of violence in American culture while working within the boundaries of self, family, and the natural world. The book permeates an apocalyptic tension, but what makes it so great is the way in which his poems envision the kind of fires that not only provide destruction but also illuminate a spark of hope.
I interviewed Williams about his book, which will be coming out on NBP podcast soon (seems like most of my poetry reading is focused around my podcasting work these days).
I interviewed Williams about his book, which will be coming out on NBP podcast soon (seems like most of my poetry reading is focused around my podcasting work these days).
June 2, 2019
This book was a Best of the Best for the month of June, 2019, as selected by Stevo's Book Reviews on the Internet. You can find me at http://forums.delphiforums.com/stevo1, on my Stevo's Novel Ideas Amazon Influencer page (https://www.amazon.com/shop/stevo4747) or search for me on Google for many more reviews and recommendations.
April 16, 2019
"We flesh awe/from raw human material, like kids/again, howling at all their otherness/until the otherness becomes us."
March 29, 2020
Beautiful words on very dark subjects regarding humanity, a punch to the heart. I probably shoulda read this in a better headspace but I still loved it.
July 15, 2020
Glad I became familiar with JSW’s work in nearly every journal read. Fortunate to hear him read at AWP with S. Roderick Roxas-Chua and Ilya Kaminksy at IPRC. This collection is all-consuming fire.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews