The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard's Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard's poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, "where to be small and furious is enough."

Book Information
ISBN 9781682260937
Author Jess Williard
Format Paperback
Page Count 50
Imprint University of Arkansas Press
Publisher University of Arkansas Press