Corrie Williamson
Corrie Williamson is the author of Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is currently at work on a manuscript of poems that travel between modern day Montana, where she lives, and early 19th century Fincastle, Virginia and St. Louis, Missouri, where they trace the voice and history of Julia Hancock Clark, the woman who married explorer William Clark and followed him west. Poems from this manuscript have recently appeared in AGNI, 32 Poems, Terrain.Org, Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and other journals.
Reading List
Field Clearing, After the Wedding
Fincastle, Virginia: 1808 When trees cast their shadows in a long line, their gathered shade brushing the nearest tree’s trunk & branches, they may be cleared in a single roiling wave. Cuts must be well-placed. The wedged mouth of the …
The River Where You Forgot My Name
St. Louis, Missouri, 1810 I thank providence for directing the whale to us; and think Him much more kind to us than he was to Jonah, having Sent this monster to be Swallowed by us in Sted of Swallowing of …
Leap Year & the New Madrid Earthquakes
St. Louis, 1812 In town, chimneys fall like wasps’ nests broomed from eaves. The bricked streets chasm into maws. Bells rang as far away as Boston, the papers claim, whole forests dragged into fissures, the big muddy calved & stalling …
Bread Alone
Having accidentally thrown out their decade old sourdough culture, the bakers at Park Avenue come to my friend Nick at the Sweet Grass & ask, can he find it in his heart to share a dollop of starter with …
Anti-Ars Poetica
for Steve Scafidi There are days the anger dries it up. There’s the sense that the driver pulled over, lugged the unicorn into his pickup, opened the pale hide with a buck knife, fed the red wet flesh through a slurping grinder & …
Leaning Towards Manifesto
Audio recording of author reading “Leaning Towards Manifesto” Composting is next to godliness. – My father Take your own advice: if Orpheus is in it or vultures (the impulse there is the same: skull picked clean by pain, mutilated song, …
The Evolution of Nightmare
. . . with her hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament . . . Heaven swallowed the smoke. – Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney In the dream, the linguist with …
Where the sentence ends the sentiment burgeons
Years since the old woman’s grandson turned early to ash and years since she’s seen the young woman who was his lover but seeing her now extends her arms crying you look just the same as that first day coming …