C.C.

Tyrone Williams’ intensely moving first book bridges more gaps than many words (and careers) thrice as long: quiet humor to quiet anger; weighty concerns (cybernetics, anthropology, astronomy) to formal invention; brilliant appropriation to startling beauty; street language to a full panoply of sophisticated theory; above all between African American concerns and those of the plain vanilla majority. The reference, as craft and time demand, is ever to mother language. This uncommon rapture, a burning repetition of home truths, in resolutely future tense, bears the profound political motto of "character as a function of work." Character survives.

--Nathaniel Tarn

Slanging each other we drift apart. Maybe there is a war outside. Will web sites continue to explode? The poems in C.C. are tense, troubled, intricately terse. In this powerful collection Tyrone Williams explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history.

--Susan Howe

Tyrone Williams teaches literature, literary theory, and creative writing at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had a chapbook, Convalescence (Rigdeway Press, 1987, 2nd edition 1989, 3rd edition 1994) and he has published poetry in Hambone, Callaloo, The Denver Quarterly, River Styx, The Kenyon Review, Artful Dodge, Berkeley Poetry Review, The Colorado Review, and other national magazines.