As iZ

Tyrone Williams

In times of dire word-thirst due to a malabsorption of History’s artifacts, we turn to Tyrone Williams’s codes & keys to crack the truly ‘alter’ political realms. Master of micro-tonic excavations of symbolic signi cance, Williams pares down the logical fripperies of Civilizations’ intentionalities. ere, neither the world-out-there nor the world-in-here predominate, but rather an intermundia of “belaborated” rites & rituals sound out some of the rarest and most provocative poetry of our times.

As iZ maps a global buzz or buzz-saw’s path, one that links us all. Riding wave after wave of an English that’s always alert and deeply alive, it reaches far into more than its poet’s self and, with a ferocious poignancy, rises up out of that reach. Market forces meet worldwide crises; bodies of knowledge are salvaged and mined; Middle Easts blur into Middle Americas—and Africas into the Sea of Everything. Restlessly political, variously musical, Tyrone Williams’s poems make beautiful, disturbing connections.

Hap of what would, were u to click on Seth, or Thoth? Gates of Hell, heavenly oasis, A’raf splitting the difference. Tyrone Williams’s syncretic ex(ed)-index excurses on differential topologies of land and water, “here” and not-here, in b&w, in choler. Collidescopic dark cornucopia—uncollocation of exergues from uncompleted X-fers—As iZ deretro ts the globe’s globality to reve(a)l how gaping the stopgaps, to let in anti-Orientalism’s non-Occident oxygen. In desert sea-sands and ocean deserts, in “the” Sky. And ashed phonemes fly. A nonsite archiving displacement (Cairo, Ill.?) “vector per vector” of victors and victims, disclosing dysco-ordinate cardinal direction incarnadine, this errant hieratic aren’t (apparently) heirant. But yet accumulate cumuli, rubricated rubbles, literature’s mummy ambidextrously unwrapped to “interfere with what is before us.” A counter-Champollion to unmast-icate pirate, refugee, slave—encryptions cripped and descripted—exploded Library of Paradise: “Feast of Scraps.” (With Riemann (and Ozymandias? (Whiz, for short)), we can only guess at the circumference.

In As iZ, Tyrone Williams is on a world stage in an archeological endeavor of digging up the roots of contemporary conflict and incurable stalemate. A tireless and jivy experimenter of language, Williams deploys a sonorous gurgling of words, divided by sound magic and reassembled by meaning in a language that combines many modes, from placid narrative to brittle rhetoric. His abandonment of full circle ideas, truncation of vegetating theories and the domes of solid states hasten a transmogrification where structures are quintessentially amorphous and the ‘left out’ is a perennial reminder of what is omnipresent but out-of-scope in this re-examination of the sagas of conflict-history.