As One Fire Consumes Another

What happens when metaphysics and social critique meet? Poetry that has to find a new form to express the tension it embodies. John Sibley Williams’ newspaper-like columns in As One Fire Consumes Another do just that. Here, transcendent vision and trenchant social insight meet, wrestle, and end up revitalizing one another.    John Sibley Williams is the author of the poetry collections Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He serves as the editor of The Inflectionist Review and has edited two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013). Williams is the winner of numerous literary awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, the Philip Booth Award, the American Literary Review Poetry Contest, the Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, the 46er Prize, the Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, the Confrontation Poetry Prize, and the Vallum Award for Poetry. He lives in Portland, Or