Unmanly Grief: Poems

By Jess Williard

Finalist, 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

"Poems that lead us to striking insights and strange destinations."
--Billy Collins

The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard's poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, "where to be small and furious is enough."

Finalist, 2020 Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award from the Binghamton Center for Writers

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1682260933
• ISBN13: 9781682260937
• Release Date: March 2019
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Length: 50 Pages
• Weight: 0.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.3"