Falling ill

A capstone to an unforgettable career; Over the past half century, the great shape-shifting poet C. K. Williams took upon himself the poet's task: to record with candor and ardor the burden of being alive. In Falling Ill, his final volume of poems, he brings this task to its conclusion, bearing witness to a restless mind's encounter with the brute fact of the body's decay, the spirit's erasure. Written with unsparing lyricism and relentless discursive logic, these brave poems face unflinchingly the dreadful edge of a precipice where a futureless future stares back. Urgent, unpunctuated,…