Reading the late Tyrone Williams’s last book, befittingly released by his alma mater, is to be caught up in a bittersweet moment which pulses both with loss and pleasure at rediscovering this poet’s immense power to summon the sounds of his culture. We do well to stow away umbrellas, rain boots, thunder coats and instead let the lyric make direct contact at the throat, ribcage and imprint its music as it rises, spills and slides between word and thing. It pours! It writes! “splashing pools of awww…”

I often do some of the writing in bed. The house finally quiet. Grandbaby asleep, Max’s murderous mewling on pause, laptops muted. A state of unresisting yet restive somnolence passes through me. I‘m both dead tired and buoyed up by the poem that’s coming my way.

Poet Chris Tysh’s latest publications are Hotel des Archives: A Trilogy (Station Hill Press, 2018)and Derrida’s In/Voice (BlazeVOX 2020). She holds fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Kresge Foundation, as well as a Murray Jackson Creative Scholar in the Arts Award from Wayne State University where she teaches writing. She is the poetry editor of Three Fold, an independent arts quarterly.

Poet, playwright and translator, Chris Tysh has been on the faculty of the English Department at Wayne State University since 1989, where she teaches creative writing and women’s studies. She has authored several poetry collections and completed a full screenplay based on a novel of Georges Bataille.