Overview

""This tour through Piranesian dreamworlds is also a tour through collective desire. With a subtle clarity, Jennifer Williams shows how our fears and longings manifest in architectural fantasies: the dream home, the model workplace, the palace of wonders. The buildings of these tense lyrics are at once familiar and disturbing, the way an influencer's aspirational feed betrays what's bloodthirsty about want. Where one poem comforts or pleases, another unsettles, and another confuses, because in this oneiric logic feelings flow with less reason and more truth. By pursuing her own obsessions with skilful and restrained poetic commitment, Williams has made a very personal map that anyone can, and should, follow in order to find themselves lost."" —Harry Josephine Giles ""Like Italo Calvino's invisible cities, these oneiric architectures rise up revealing a glimmering imagination. The visually compelling constructions in these poems possess a beauty that can be subtly unsettling in its materials, proportions, or the relationships or emotions hidden within. At a time when our eyes are already jaded from the remixed possibilities of AI-generated imagery, this intriguing collection is balm for the inner eye, offering an expansive poetics of space as well as an invitation to take in a sharper and more intricate view of the details around us, and savour the questions about our ways of inhabiting."" —Juana Adcock ""Jennifer constructs cities and skylines of words, inviting us to live within their shelter and syllables. Her poem-architectures are exact ambiguities - precisely lit from every angle of language and geometry, to pinpoint each space, each proportion."" —Iain Matheson

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9781837380251

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Books by JL Williams include Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011), Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014), House of the Tragic Poet (If A Leaf Falls Press, 2016), After Economy (Shearsman, 2017), Origin (Shearsman, 2022) and Strange Architectures (Shearsman, 2026). Published widely in journals, her poetry has been translated into numerous languages. She has read at international literature festivals and venues in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Cyprus, Canada, Hungary, Romania, Montenegro and the US. Williams has undertaken collaborations with artists, perfumers, filmmakers, composers, choreographers and others, and is currently exploring how yoga, meditation and breathwork can support creativity. She was a librettist for the award-winning covid-response Episodes project by The Opera Story and the English Touring Opera children's opera, The Wish Gatherer. Williams is Creative Projects Manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and curates Utopia Lab. She is hopeful about the simple and mysterious power of poetry that allows us to know ourselves, each other and the world more deeply.

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