Misgivings Book

A searing, poetic memoir in prose by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

My father dead, I come into the room where he lies and I say aloud, immediately concerned that he might still be able to hear me, What a war we had! . . . When my mother dies, I'll say to her, as unexpectedly, knowing as little as I'm going to, "I love you." But, to my father, again now, my voice, as though of its own accord, blurts, What a war!

C. K. Williams is the author of eight books of poems, the most recent of which, Repair, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches in the writing program at Princeton University and lives part of the year in Paris.

"Williams's short prose memoir . . . as gripping and ghastly as any of his long-lined poems, uses short narrative sections very much as if they were themselves tensed-up, overburdened lines, stringing them together into what is, by turns, an exploration, an excoriation, and finally — paradoxically — a celebration of the sorrowful vale of soul making that is family life . . . If ever there were an antidote to the reductive psychobabble that plagues our discussions of relationships, this is it. Williams leaves us marveling both at the disastrous rifts and blockages that ruin the promise of connection and the cunning of love, how it ultimately overcomes even these." (Sven Birkerts, Ruminator Review)

"On reading it one is transported with a kind of awe at being in the presence of an instant classic." (Carolyn Kizer)