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Strange Architectures
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781837380251
Publisher: Shearsman Books
Published: Mar 2 2026
Pages: 86
Weight: 0.24
Height: 0.21 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
This tour through Piranesian dreamworlds is also a tour through collective desire. With a subtle clarity, Jennifer Williams shows how our fears and longings manifest in architectural fantasies: the dream home, the model workplace, the palace of wonders. The buildings of these tense lyrics are at once familiar and disturbing, the way an influencer's aspirational feed betrays what's bloodthirsty about want. Where one poem comforts or pleases, another unsettles, and another confuses, because in this oneiric logic feelings flow with less reason and more truth. By pursuing her own obsessions with skilful and restrained poetic commitment, Williams has made a very personal map that anyone can, and should, follow in order to find themselves lost. -Harry Josephine Giles
Like Italo Calvino's invisible cities, these oneiric architectures rise up revealing a glimmering imagination. The visually compelling constructions in these poems possess a beauty that can be subtly unsettling in its materials, proportions, or the relationships or emotions hidden within. At a time when our eyes are already jaded from the remixed possibilities of AI-generated imagery, this intriguing collection is balm for the inner eye, offering an expansive poetics of space as well as an invitation to take in a sharper and more intricate view of the details around us, and savour the questions about our ways of inhabiting. -Juana Adcock
Jennifer constructs cities and skylines of words, inviting us to live within their shelter and syllables. Her poem-architectures are exact ambiguities - precisely lit from every angle of language and geometry, to pinpoint each space, each proportion. -Iain Matheson
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