Stutter: Poems - Paperback

by William Billiter (Author)

Billiter's poems, spaced to stutter on the page, create a compelling yet dark world of small-town childhood that is disorienting and not all that bucolic. The town of Shinbone is an intense place: boys set bottles of cheap aftershave on fire, which segues with uncomfortable ease into grandmother's killing axe dispatching chickens and Soup's hand shredded in the corn dryer.

This collection pushes a recollected past to an extreme, replacing memory with myth and lacing narratives of disfigurement, accident, wildness, and murder with a strange enchantment. Childhood here is no idyll, but rather the dreamlike entryway to the desires, doubts, and dismay of adulthood.

Author Biography

William Billiter is Director of Foundation, Corporate, and Government Relations at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.