Every Wreckage

The full-length collection, forthcoming from Fernwood Press in July of 2023.

In his first, full-length collection of poetry, Ian C. Williams buries, unearths, and reburies the questions of adolescence and its legacy. These poems, rooted in the mountains and forests of Appalachia, wonder after the insecurities of growing up, the fragility of fatherhood, and the longing that haunts us as we search for stability and direction. With a voice at once razor-edged and tender, Williams traverses a world deep in the underbrush, as wild as it is domestic, brimming with cocoons, cicadas, car crashes, silverware drawers, and dishes that never seem to be done. This collection examines the wreckage of our history and beckons us to “Let it rest” and wait for it to erupt in a “beautiful catastrophe of riotous bloom.”

​House of Bones

​"The title sets the theme; the poems are meat on skeletal frames, where 'man becomes fragmented collections sewn disjointedly.'"

- Linda Banks
Past President, Poetry Society of Texas


"The poems are at once intensely, viscerally particular, and highly evocative. They recreate what it feels like to live in our corruptible bodies, our houses of bones"

- Milton Bates
Professor Emeritus, Marquette University

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Ian C. Williams's debut chapbook, House of Bones, is available for purchase from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, or from the poet himself, in-person.