Hero Project of the Century by Tyrone Williams

(Backwaters Press 2009)

In these new poems, Tyrone Williams slants away from definition and memoir, teasing us with a detail or an anecdote and then slipping names, slipping markers, the news, tradition, religion, art and history unravel into dualities, redundancies, shadows, veils, slights of hand. In Hero Project of the Century, Williams reveals the news we need to hear. The American chasing after the big S Capital Self is a project that can never be fulfilled. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but after the clapping is over, there is this empty space and Williams, like an abstract jazz musician, has taken us there, deftly, cutting through the terrain of emotion and intellect.