Poetry Reading: John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov

Annie Bloom’s welcomes local poets John Sibley Williams and A. Molotkov to read from their new collections.

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.

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

Join us for the launch of A. Molotkov’s Synonyms for Silence. His third poetry collection traverses a terrain of terror and wonder. These sharp, brief lyrics and prose poems subject the world to ethical and metaphysical scrutiny, examining the familiar as well as the unknowable aspects of human existence and contrasting our transient chemical reality with our ability to manifest meaning.

This is a book in which the dead speak, grief is a bird, bombs turn to petals, scars become bridges, and snowflakes remember their last melting. Through his use of potent, sometimes perplexing metaphors and vivid, often surreal imagery, Molotkov places us in the moment of choice, of truth, of suffering, and honors it with tenderness and care, offering solace through our shared humanity.