Stutter: Poems

by William Billiter

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820338811
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	04/01/2011
Series:	The National Poetry Series
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

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.

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

After a Night of Steady Rain
Solitaire
Migrations
Acolytes at the Altar
Sweet Little Nothings
At the Grain Elevator
Snapshot from Shinbone
Covet
Uncle Ersel's Thumbs
One for the Boy, Leaning
Nothing Burns Quite so Good as Your Daddy's Aftershave
Long about the Third Watch
By Proxy
Where Are Our Dear Mothers
Pallbearers
Salt Lick
While the Lips Cover the Teeth
And They Were Scattered
The Light Shall Not Be Clear nor Dark
Violetta e Cristina
Them Which Were Vexed
Lima South
Clot
Backcountry
Still Life
D
Chokecherry
Wanted:
October Last, Sally
Depth Charge
Positive Crankshaft Ventilation
Nebuchadnezzar's Confession to Prometheus
Lower Reserve
Goodbye Is a BB Ricochets in Your Eye
The Lineman
The Final Syllable
Ain't No Sense to Make of It Lest You Call It What It Is
To My Blue-Changed Opinion
Houses Hushed, Holy
Every Day Is Arbitrary
Hypotheses
Where All That Walks Wild Is
First Adultery
Stutter
Obedience
Maybe Stink

Editorial Reviews

In William Billiter’s prize-winning book, Stutter, the voices seem to halt and syncopate. Yet readers never turn away from these voices, not once. . . . In Stutter, speech itself becomes subject, the pages’ space and breadth giving language itself its holy stutter and magic. This book is truly divine. I loved it as all readers must.

Luschei Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor of Prairie Schooner - Hilda Raz

Because of Billiter’s Stutter we meet Scooter, Blake, Moses, Stutter, Stink, Lloyd, Ersel, Willy, Niebuhr, and Gethsemane, and we have seats reserved for us: Section 3, Row Q, Seats 11 & 12. Meanwhile we learn that a flinch is a kind of echo and an echo is what one man needs to register depths of knowledge about family, fathers and sons, confessions, and the future. Stutter’s a shapely, resonant, heartbreaking book.

author of Reverse Rapture - Dara Wier

“In William Billiter’s prize-winning book, Stutter, the voices seem to halt and syncopate. Yet readers never turn away from these voices, not once. . . . In Stutter, speech itself becomes subject, the pages’ space and breadth giving language itself its holy stutter and magic. This book is truly divine. I loved it as all readers must.”— Hilda Raz, Luschei Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor of Prairie Schooner

“Because of Billiter’s Stutter we meet Scooter, Blake, Moses, Stutter, Stink, Lloyd, Ersel, Willy, Niebuhr, and Gethsemane, and we have seats reserved for us: Section 3, Row Q, Seats 11 & 12. Meanwhile we learn that a flinch is a kind of echo and an echo is what one man needs to register depths of knowledge about family, fathers and sons, confessions, and the future. Stutter’s a shapely, resonant, heartbreaking book.”—Dara Wier, author of Reverse Rapture

From the Publisher