Love About Love [Hardcover]

C.K. Williams (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2001

Poetry. In LOVE ABOUT LOVE, C. K. Williams has created a wholly new context for poems written over a lifetime. Culled from all of his previous collections, the poems have been reorganized by the author, sometimes radically, into a sequence that throws startling fresh light on them. With his characteristic intensity and directness, Williams explores the many faces of his subject -- passion, affection, sexuality, loneliness, jealousy, loss -- in poems remarkable for their range and ingenuity. LOVE ABOUT LOVE is an unsentimental and unsparing self-assessment by a poet writing at the height of his powers, a vital study of the evolution of a consciousness that is truth-telling, passionate, and profound. REPAIR, the most recent book by Williams, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize; he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Lila Wallace Fellow, has twice received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and has received numerous other awards. LOVE ABOUT LOVE is also available in hardcover from SPD.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

On the heels of Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning Repair and just a few years after his Selected Poems comes this thematic repackaging of work spanning three decades. The focus is ostensibly love in all of its aspects, from childhood stirrings to adolescent lust to the layered complexities of adult relationships. But the real subject is Williams, since these earnest, prose-like interrogations are more like fevered diary entries or recordings from a therapist's couch ("The trouble with me is that whether I get love or not/ I suffer from it") than love poems. Like the late Harold Brodkey, Williams is committed to relentless self-analysis, to understanding his condition and articulating its every nuance ("I huddled there at the center of myself and tried to know by some/ reflexive act of faith/ that I'd survive all this, this thing, my self, that mauled and savaged me"). The wide range of experiences described is guaranteed to strike at least one nerve in any reader, but poetry this unabashedly self-absorbed and overdrawn will likely be of greatest interest to those who prize the stylistic precedents set by the confessional poets of the 1960s.DFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

C.K. Williams grew up in Newark, NJ and attended the University of Pennsylvania. He has written over a dozen books of poetry and been awarded many prizes, including the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Princeton University and lives part of the year in France.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 160 pages
• Publisher: Ausable Press; 1st edition (2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967266823
• ISBN-13: 978-0967266824
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,122,654 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A somewhat off-putting book, yet very courageous and well worth the effort to read!, January 14, 2012

By 

Neal Jettpace "Wannabe Renaissance Man" (Indianapolis, In) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love About Love (Paperback)

When this book first arrives, you will not like it. The poetic cadence is of obvious secondary consideration, and the line breaks reflect the writing of the time (which is still too close to now 2012, as to be yesterday's fashion.) There is a somewhat unrevised feel here, as if the author wanted to "get it down on paper", the subject matter being a very hot potato of sorts.

Then you will pick it up several days later and love it. The courageous handling of the subject matter - erotic love and everything associated both good and bad, make it well worth the effort to read. (And it's not that much an effort.) The awkward style of its stanzas is more than made up for in the courage of its convictions.

Everything erotic is addressed here with brutal honesty. Childhood, envy, joy, aging, miscommunication, mojo, groove (and the lack thereof); no chambers are left unexamined. This is a very sincere survey of the erotic dimension of a life, in poetic form. A life that upon reading we find uncomfortable echoes of in our own and those we know.

I'm guessing that one needs to be in a certain place to have these poems speak to you. The biblical exhortation "Let those with ears to hear, listen" is becoming. If you happen to be in that place (for whatever reason), buy the book. You'll find yourself not alone in your imperfection, embracing of our shared need and vulnerability. And very glad, forgiving even for that.