U.S. Supreme Court decisions on policing, Joseph Conrad’s , death certificates, physics textbooks, property labels on books. In their debut poetry collection, , published in May by Alice James Books, Candace Williams reshapes all of these texts to reveal their underlying premises about power. Through erasures and forms that rely on repetition—such as the ghazal and Bop, a form created by poet Afaa Michael Weaver—Williams critiques capitalism and racism, documenting the realities of being “a poet exhausted and hurting
