Williams's spare, moving, and illuminating debut poetry collection is written with rare feeling for silence, blankness, and the blurred reality of caring for a parent suffering from dementia. "Who are we now?" Williams asks, often, throughout White Doe, the inquiry voiced at times by the speaker, but also her father, her mother, and their voices in unison. Williams uses the question to signify much, especially the loss of identity on the part of the father with dementia and a corresponding one experienced by the surviving family members. The collection asks, amid observations of caring for him ("a new language from// a black cave// bats batsb atsbats mba tsbats") and affecting memory and nature poems ("we hear a crack in the field, birds rush/ from their branches"), who does the speaker become as she loses her father?
Absence is multi-dimensional in Williams's collection; on the page, the use of white space allows the size and scope of this absence to expand and contract, all while emphasizing for readers silences and at times snowy landscapes. Crucial bits of language, like the mind of the speaker's father, at times are missing, and some poems seem to be crumbling on the page, the words like rubble. But even on the metaphorical level, Williams makes absence a living presence: "that missing // painting on the wall // shines its own sun like dirt." The power of White Doe, though, comes from precision of language and a surprising sense of hope, as Williams captures an awakening in the loss.Birds, their feathers, and the seeds they collect, along with coyotes, deer, snow, and ice, appear and disappear from poem to poem, contextualizing the speaker and her ailing father in the natural order of life and death. "Word of your passing has reached the tree line," Williams writes in "Don't Be Afraid," "now the animals // sing," and the loved ones grieve, and the necessary, beautiful cycle continues. -- Booklife Editor's Pick

"White Doe has it all-image, metaphor, line, formal innovation and risk, emotional stakes-and I've never read anything like it. I say this as a fan and an editor."

-Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful

"Maria Williams' White Doe deftly reveals the arrangements of human grief. The poems sharply illuminate what cannot be enough against the possibility of what must be. Out of the memory of fields, birds, and light emerges the gift of revelation."

- E. J. Koh, author of The Liberators and The Magical Language of Others

"I am in love with this dreamy, astonishing, exquisite book."

-Marcela Sulak, author of Mouth Full of Seeds

Publisher: Saddle Road Press

Pub date: 2024-09-09

Length: 78 pages