JL Williams Poetry

Strange Architectures by JL Williams (Shearsman Books, 2026)

Adrienne Rich famously wrote “poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know”. This dream knowledge gives shape to numerous architectural spaces in Williams’s collection. We are told in her notes that each is in fact a separate dream: many were dreamed and compiled during lockdown and the early days of motherhood, both carceral experiences in different but not entirely unrewarding ways. Hence the efflorescence of poems. If in psychoanalysis dream houses stand in for the self, then Williams throws open many different doors to find the complex furniture of shame, grief, lost love or friendship. Via the unconscious we enter hotels, houses, single rooms, bars, shopping malls, walled gardens; some uncannily familiar, others entirely foreign. We find ultimately what “feels like a real place / but is not a real place – joy, pure joy”. The self turns out to be the only reliable home, and our obsessive need for it is an estrangement from happiness: “A house / made entirely / of very charred / slabs of wood”. Rooms cannot hold us safely for ever. We must carry joy within us, against adversity and threat.

Sandeep Parmar, The Guardian