You Don’t Have to Believe in the World

Praise for william erickson

“The poems in william erickson’s You Don’t Have to Believe in the World are uncanny and bear a strangeness reminiscent of Zachary Schomburg’s early work; simultaneously, the poems are spare and sincere, conjuring the ghost of George Oppen. While reading, one has the sense that each word is filled with care–painstakingly chosen, held, placed. Yet the lines unfold ‘light as morning.’ Yet the folds are dark with fog. Yet wonder and invention are tucked in, opening like a paper lantern. On the edge of each line the surreal and the corporeal merge. ‘The world begins / from the nowhere / of your pupils / and flowers / and flowers.’”
– Danika Stegeman, author of Ablation

“‘I sit outside in the weather / and listen for languages,’ william erickson tells us. These poems are the result of that listening. In the poet’s body, languages build up, until they emerge dense and potent in structures so quiet, so devastating, so multidimensional that readers reel in slow-mo from one delicious soft shock to another. The speaker’s body extends into the landscape, and/ or the landscape furnishes parts of the ongoing, changing body, ‘folding into earth / like an unblooming apple.’ These poems are hauntings, too; we will want and need to keep returning to them, will carry them with us in mutual inhabitation. ‘Ghosts are just bodies / too great to keep / hidden inside.’ We are lucky to accompany erickson on his world- and word-making journeys, where ‘[o]n the lip of the desert / [his] tongues pile up,’ and so do ours.”
– Jay Besemer, author of Your Tongue as Long as a Tuesday