Review of my forthcoming chapbook, A Pure River

"John Sibley Williams is undoubtedly one of the most significant new voices emerging in the 21st century. He represents poetry as it is supposed to be, with all the lessons of the past’s masters and a fresh flavor of a modern mind. Williams is intensely at home with half-objects, things almost said, entities that exist between reality and interpretation, fact and perception, memory and metaphor. The skillful ambiguity of his work is a dreamfiled for a sophisticated contemporary reader accustomed to inhabiting text and finding their own place within it, where interpretation contributes to a unique dialog between the poem and the reader. It is the poets like John Sibley Williams who remind us that there are mental and semantic fields yet to ponder, despite the millions that have already self-exploded from overexposure. In his capability to combine the minute exploration of the texture of being with a general compassion for the humankind it its many manifestations, Williams reminds us of such voices as Paul Celan, Paul Eluard and William Stafford. With this wonderful chapbook, he instantly becomes a literary phenomenon to reckon with."

-A. Molotkov, 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and author of the novel everything