Sign-In
Cart
Dancing on the X
Paperback
Publisher Price: $22.99
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Published: Sep 26 2025
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Todd Williams' Dancing on the X is a journey into the heart of the American experience, filtered through the lens of a Generation X childhood and the disorienting passage into midlife. This compelling debut collection captures the bittersweet ache of nostalgia, the weight of history, and the search for meaning in a world increasingly defined by noise and illusion.
Divided into three sections, the collection guides the reader through a landscape of memory and modern reality. Opening with the sweeping and side-eyed epic America, Maybe, William's begins by grappling with the nation's complex mythology-its promises, failures, and enduring, fractured beauty. He then pivots to the personal, evoking a youth spent in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, where wonder was found in tourist traps like The Cosmos, family vacations in a '73 Datsun, and the shared cultural touchstones of The Beatles vs. Styx, 1981.
From the wrestling heroes of Sunday Mornings with the Crusher to the mixtapes buried in basement boxes, Williams excavates the artifacts of a generation raised on latchkey independence and the confident, if naive, belief that the X on our treasure maps marked a spot safe from all the pitfalls our parents endured. Yet, these poems are not mere exercises in reminiscence. They are clear-eyed and often humorous, asking what happens when that generation grows up to find itself, like Wile E. Coyote, finally catching the Road Runner only to ask, Now what do I do?
The later sections, Love in a Time of Caldera and A Mouthful of Moon, maturely navigate the terrain of adulthood: fatherhood in Snow Day with Sophia, love in Accidental Kiss, loss in I Wear My Dead Father's Socks, and the anxieties of modern life, from pandemics to political divides in poems like My Pandemic Face and Mitch McConnell Stares Out at the Sea. Williams writes with equal parts grace and grit about the rust of frayed cartilage and the relentless pull of everything we've ever lost, cataloged with heartbreaking specificity in Flight 370.
Also from
Williams, Todd
Forex for Beginners: Day Trading Strategies to Make Money Online With the 1-Hour Trade
Williams, Todd
Paperback
How to Make Serious Money with Binary Options: Things You Need to Know Before You Start Trading Binary Options
Williams, Todd
Paperback
Peopled Leadership: Growing People and Transforming Organizations
Mayers, R. Stewart
Williams, Todd
Anderson, Jennifer M.
Paperback
The Secret Guide to Making Money with Investments: Learn What to Invest in & Have Your Money Work for You
Williams, Todd
Paperback
Peopled Leadership: Growing People and Transforming Organizations
Mayers, R. Stewart
Williams, Todd
Anderson, Jennifer M.
Hardcover
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Pitavy, Francois
Alighieri, Dante
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Plath, Sylvia
Paperback
This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have
Smith, Joshua Luke
Hardcover