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My new chapbook, A Pure River, has been published by The Last Automat Press. Let me know if you'd like to hear more about it. Alot of info is on my website (TheArtOfRaining.com). Here are a few blurbs:

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

John Sibley Williams is a poet of rare skill. Precise, spare, vivid; his images sneak from the page into the memory. Even when he’s describing abandoned towns, deserted roads, Williams sketches the rust belt, the desert, the Midwest, with aching beauty. An outsider with the eye of a poet, he catalogues his surroundings with accurate and playful detail. “People…define bad water/ as all rivers never crossed,” Williams says, but he isn’t afraid to cross the river and see what lies on the other side. His poems are one part travelogue, one part love-letters to America. He asks, “Would I too prefer to live slowly/ like how a child learns to speak/ than rush through a novel’s breadth before noon/ without recalling a single character’s eyes?” The answer is a resounding No! Williams takes his time, all the while searching for that “pure river.” Buy this book; beat the rush before Williams is the name on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

-CL Bledsoe is the author of _____(Want/Need) and Anthem and the editor for Ghoti Magazine.

John Sibley Williams is truly gifted and well deserving of the awards and recognition his poems have garnered. He genuinely touches and inspires the heart of the reader through vivid images of the places he has been and chronicled so effectively. It has been my privilege to read, contemplate, and thoroughly enjoy A Pure River.

-Anita Lanning, Vice President of Central Oregon Writers Guild

1) A Pure River is a walk inside perceptions, a view into forever.

2) There is poetic scenery here; emotion and heart.

3) The river meets the road; the child met the man.

4) A Pure River is a sojourn into the past and a trip cross-country; an experience of the soul.

-Deborah Stinson, editor of Unfettered Verse

A Pure River is a travelogue through the archaisms and illusions of American society. John Sibley Williams's beautifully-cast rhythms refresh dry landscapes and display a discerning -- and buoyant -- intelligence that turns scenes of isolation into small planets with their own gravitational pull.

-Jerry Bradley, poetry editor, Concho River Review, and author of Simple Versions of Disaster & The Importance of Elsewhere

Williams employs an austere selection of metaphoric language that serves to intensify his imagery and reveal layered meanings. What furthermore makes him an accomplished poet is his ability to summon fresh redolence out of old images, skillfully evoked in poems such as ?A Certain Pasture Near Gettysburg? and ?Farmer?s Almanac.? In the same vein, ?Traveling Through the Rust Belt? and ?Idaho, Moments After Sunset? are exemplary of what succeeds in poetry through their resiliently subtle power of pastoral, if not stark and lonely imagery -- the very kind that recalls great poets such as James Wright and Walt McDonald.
I have been reviewing works of poetry for over ten years, and I find John Sibley Williams? chapbook among the best. It thus comes with my highest recommendation.

-Jeff Alfier, San Pedro River Review Editor

These precisely crafted poems are landscapes across the U.S., landscapes of the earth and the mind, where the horizon is crisscrossed between dream and wakefulness with wisely varied results. Underneath, the seed, the implement buried in the ground; above, the high-voltage lines and daylight stars. And in between, a fascinating poetic voice guiding us through the wreck.

Ricardo Nirenberg, editor, Offcourse

John Sibley Williams “A Pure River” is replete with beautifully crafted poems of place. The rail yards of Illinois, the fields and silos of the Rust Belt, the “the sober gnashing of naked branches and juniper,/ where perception is defined by absence” in the poem “South Texas Shadow.” There are New England covered bridges and Idaho sunsets. It is not an easy task to bring the visual to life in words, but Williams does it with panache.

Lori Desrosiers, publisher, Naugatuck River Review

We are told a picture is worth a thousand words. In his collection of travel-based poems, A Pure River, John Sibley Williams proves that the right words can paint a thousand pictures. Each poem in this collection is a snapshot capturing both the landscape and emotion of Williams’ cross-country travels. His observations of rusted boxcars, abandoned barns, and monuments atop bridges become entry points into the scenic highways of human existence. Williams invites readers to leave behind their travel brochures and venture with their hearts to destinations not found on most postcards.
Williams’ writing is filled with vivid descriptions, but it is never ostentatious. His poetry begs to be savored. Readers will enjoy how he can take an event as mundane as watching a black and white cowboy film in his hotel room and turn it into an exploration of the soul’s movement. If cameras could capture images the way Williams captures them with words, no one would dread the question “Would you like to see the pictures I took on my trip?”
-Vinnie Kinsella, editor of Four and Twenty

The new issue of Sand Hill Review (Volume XI, 2010) [sandhillreview.org] includes four of my poems: "The Ring," "The Music Teacher," "The World Before Us," & "Class."
It's a nice magazine, published at Stanford, California, poetry edited by Janice Dabney.
you can reach me by email at retap1@stanford.edu
Cheers.

Hard Landing by Rick Smith (Lummox Press, Aug. 2010)
ISBN 978-1-929878-19-2 -- $15
Buy direct from Lummox and receive a bonus CD of Rick Smith reading 16 poems from HL.

A Love Letter to Darwin by Jane Crown (Lummox Press, Sept. 2010)
ISBN 978-1-929878-21-5 -- $15
Buy direct from Lummox or via Amazon

For more info, please visit the Lummox Catalog at
http://www.lummoxpress.com/lummoxpress/indexlp.htm

there is a new poetry corner at Tiferet

http://www.tiferetjournal.com/

August poetry corner
http://www.tiferetjournal.com/page/poetry-corner-by-silent-lotus-2

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