As One Fire Consumes Another
Poems by John Sibley Williams
 
Winner of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize, selected by Vandana Khanna
paper  /  86 pp.  /  $16.00
Orison Books
Print ISBN: 978-1-949039-01-6
Distributed to the trade by Itasca Books
1-800-901-3480  /  orders@itascabooks.com
Publication Date: April 2, 2019
 
 
ABOUT THE BOOK
 
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.
 
 
PRAISE
 
John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. […] The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence.
–Poets & Writers
 
John Sibley Williams’ collection As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family and history and country, beyond the body’s tragedies, the “silenced bones of others.” These poems rise as invocation, as testimonial to life’s unfiltered beauty, violence, and faith, to the “light . . . already in us.”
–Vandana Khanna, judge of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize
 
As One Fire Consumes Another is a rare creation full of song and seethe. Though Williams’ poems are composed of casket-like rectangular frames,