Wait

I just read a book of poetry for English class, and I figured, why not write about it on here. It was by renowned American poet C. K. Williams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2000, and it is the most recent book of his long career. Williams is a poet who uses his poetry to comment on the world. A lot of the poems are written in a style modeled after Walt Whitman, in fact, Williams cites Whitman as one of his major inspirations. Wait is about death and sadness, but is also an analysis of the fallacies he sees in the world. In many poems, he lets the reader experience his thoughts un-filtered. For example, in his poem I Hate, he writes "I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound/not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling/ keeps rasping in me..." The poem is one loong sentence that is Williams deciphering the basis of his sadness, which I highly recommend you read. Williams cannot imagine that America will turn out for the better, yet as one review writes, "Williams continues to search for the good in America....[he] is a pessimist who longs to feel otherwise...to retain a margin of faith in America as a society capable of good." I've never really read poetry before, besides skimming through Selected Poems by e. e. cummings, and of course, Robert Frost's poem Nothing Gold Can Stay along with a few other random assortment of poems in English classes throughout the year. Wait was the first poetry book I read on my own and fully, and I strongly recommend it. Rating: ★★★★