John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. [...] The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence. 

—Poets & Writers magazine

John Sibley Williams’ collection As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family and history and country, beyond the body’s tragedies, the “silenced bones of others.” These poems rise as invocation, as testimonial to life’s unfiltered beauty, violence, and faith, to the “light . . . already in us.” 

—Vandana Khanna, judge of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize 

What is inside a box? The question is its mystery. Like an American Vasko Popa, Williams offers us a book of little boxes, “each one contained eternities and histories.” If you reach into the dark of these boxes, what you find will surprise, enlighten and terrify you. One of the most original books of poetry I have read in decades. 

—Sean Thomas Dougherty 

As One Fire Consumes Another is a rare creation full of song and seethe. Though Williams’ poems are composed of casket-like rectangular frames, their feral energy throbs against justified lines, creating vital articulations in a world where empathy is under erasure—where “even our ghosts have left us.” His is a poetics of elegy and inquiry. These poems serve as witness to lives lost and interrogations of America’s violence as well as its willed amnesia of that brutality. It is a book of radiance and ruin that manages to be benevolent while breathing fire. 

—Simone Muench 

In the incandescent poems of John Sibley Williams’ As One Fire Consumes Another, the suggestion of a collective we is another violence in a violent world where peace and war are suffered in equal measure. These poems live in brilliant little cages that Williams has built for them, the language itself held to the fire. This collection grieves. It flames. It says your heart / hurts, and your heart hurts. I am in awe of the beauty and conflict, the elegance and restraint. These poems live in the merciless wilds of memory and tradition, where surrender means being consumed, and everything is made to burn. 

—Chelsea Dingman  

If America’s collective conscience is at war, the wounds and battle scars are in full display in John Sibley Williams’ arresting book. No matter how dream-like, no matter how nightmarish or surreal, its startling landscapes reveal accurate truths about our country’s dark humanity. Poem after poem, the strange elegance of As One Fire Consumes Another is remarkable and daunting. 

—Rigoberto González 

These poems, clenched tight within a unified form, are the surreal dispatches of one mind thrashing against a larger American conscience that, in order to preserve its "sanity," must willfully ignore its unending thirst for violence. Time and again, through a kind of extended phantasmagoria, these poems illustrate how those countless acts of madness, seething just beneath America's surface, have been so casually ushered from collective memory, like how, "Blood washes quickly from the tile / floor." 

—William Brewer 

As One Fire Consumes Another is a guide through a troubled heritage and eventually death. Each sonic rich poem places the reader in a different size coffin to watch life, making death always on the mind. Full of passion and heart, this book is always digging through the rubble towards life. 

—Tyree Daye 

John Sibley Williams indeed uses fire to consume fire, as his work’s title enjoins. His poetry sets the normative uses of poetic language alight and burns away our safe skin of lyric expectation and contextual surety. At the core of this work, for me, there is not only the fierceness of fire, but the flow of blood. It is a poetry that does indeed “bleed the body of its language. Upside down above a trough, throat slit open at the name.” Williams takes each of the ways his speaking agent knows others and knows the self, knows family and history, and physical well being, and opens them to expose what has been denied, what is concealed behind the names we use as placation and false panacea. Do not expect to read these poems and be unchallenged, unchanged. While Williams manifests a speaking agent who is exquisitely culpable, courageously interrogating his lineages of human failings, a reader can’t help but identify with what is the core of these crises. In that identification, I find how to enact for myself this kind of daunting journey, to walk into a fire and emerge burned and bled, and in that freed from living in denial. I will call this a work of recognizable revelations: not revelations that suggest serenity or imperturbability might be achieved, 

not revelations of how to leave our suffering behind. Rather it is revelation of compassion for others as well as for ourselves, in exactly who we are. From that comes an acceptance of the endless ache that is the human condition. As Williams recounts, one can come to a “dawn [of] burnt umber & all sorts of longing, one fire consuming another.” 

—Rusty Morrison 

* Review in The Oregonian: https://expo.oregonlive.com/life-and-culture/g66l-2019/06/23ae33d78f9144/4-new-poetry-collections-that-rouse-the-senses-from-poets-with-northwest-ties.html

“This is an important book from a major talent. Williams is an honest witness of a nation’s foibles, a writer who has the chops to see and name the worst in us and then divine it into something humane and beautiful to read.”  

* Interview in Poets & Writers: https://www.pw.org/content/literary_magnet_john_sibley_williams_0

“Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship.”

* Interview in Shelf Awareness: https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3465#m43906

“I don't know how many times I've read Man's Search for Meaning by psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl. A dozen? With each reading, I find new questions to ask myself, the world and my place in the world.”

* Notable New Release Listing in BookRiot: https://bookriot.com/listen/new-releases-and-more-for-april-2-2019/

* April/May Small Press Listing in Entropy: https://entropymag.org/april-and-may-small-press-releases/

* Bookshelf Listing in The Writers’ Chronicle: May 2019 print issue

* New & Noteworthy Books Listing in NewPages: https://www.newpages.com/books/new-book-arrivals?fbclid=IwAR36ED_t5xCCpOlQa_0Hol87g39n0WtqWLGiQi09G6dh7-CQ1U2_xOlov7 

* Review in New York Journal of Books: https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/one-fire-consumes-another

“The great strength of Williams’ collection and of his vision is, in the end, its capaciousness, his ability to speak contradictory truths, to remind us that the same fire that burns also shines within us.”

* Review in The Carolina Quarterly: https://thecarolinaquarterly.com/2019/11/the-low-harm-art-a-review-of-as-one-fire-consumes-another/?fbclid=IwAR3O-tYKy5fAXxRv_V3smTYn8udH06krig7eWPFZgXz5nOJg2-mwxw7OixI 

“In a striking meditation on American brutality, in both its domestic and international incarnations at borders, in proxy wars, or in the raw aftermath of lynch-law, the poet bears witness to an unending series of fires—the destruction that attends historical cycles of oppression, vigilantism, and white supremacy that get encoded into daily language, dysfunctional family relationships, national myth, and popular symbols.” 

* Review in Today’s Book of Poetry: https://michaeldennispoet.blogspot.com/2020/03/as-one-fire-consumes-another-john.html  

“It really doesn't get any better than this. Every poem in As One Fire Consumes Another is essential stuff.  John Sibley Williams is one of the very best poets of his generation.” 

* Review in Mid-American Review: February 2020 print issue 

“As One Fire Consumes Another is not only an incredibly relevant book for our time, but also an impressive work of poetry filled with haunting scenes, inventive language, interesting sound, and intense emotive effect. […] It’s a text for the here and now that could stand the test of time.”

* Review in After the Pause: https://afterthepause.com/2019/07/22/review-of-as-one-fire-consumes-another-john-sibley-williams/

“Williams’ indomitable spirit is not worth celebrating because he is an American latching onto true American values. Those were always a sham. Instead, he is worth celebrating because of something much better. He is simply a human, recognizing what kind of a home we should live in, sketching out the ways we might stop tearing off the roof and conjuring storms from ever-angered skies.” 

* Review in Pedestal Magazine: https://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/john-sibley-williamss-as-one-fire-consumes-another-reviewed-by-ace-boggess/

"As One Fire Consumes Another is an exemplar of subtlety. It hammers the reader but cushions each blow with lyrical dexterity. The language is high-minded and stirring. Williams has compiled a convincing collection – at times, mystical and inquisitive; at other times, brutally honest and direct in its take on the horrors of contemporary life. These poems are certainly worth reading more than once."

* Interview in 1859: Oregon’s Magazine: May/June 2019 print issue

“Although much of my work touches upon cultural and political concerns subtly implied within intimate interpersonal situations, this collection brings these themes to the forefront in a way that often made me uncomfortable.”

* Review in ZYZZYVA: https://www.zyzzyva.org/2019/07/15/as-one-fire-consumes-another-by-john-sibley-williams-each-poem-a-sermon/

“The poems in As One Fire Consumes Another are verbs: they implore and demand, they connect and recall, they cry out and they quietly walk away. Williams is as acutely focused on the wide arcs of historical violence and injustice as he is on everyday detail, lending each poem a sermon-like quality.”

* Review in Collateral: https://www.collateraljournal.com/blog/johnsibleywilliams

“The “cages” of these poems give shape to our complicated and chaotic struggles with gun violence, abuse, loss. It’s as if the poems hold our experiences still long enough for us to get a good look and remember why we carry them, and for that, I am grateful. This is poetry’s gift.”

* Review in Trailer Park Quarterly: http://trailerparkquarterly.com/volume-10/review-as-one-fire-consumes-another-by-john-sibley-williams/

“Williams cleverly asks us questions and allows us the sovereignty to answer on our own free will. The beauty of his poems is that they are jam packed with ideas and images, and none forcefully direct you. The ideas and images act more like a choose your own adventure, where you can go where you want to go and that is what I love most about John’s work. You can read these poems hundreds of times and never end up in the same place.”

* Podcast interview on New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/john-sibley-williams-as-one-fire-consumes-another-orison-books-2019/

* Review on Reviews by Amos Lassen: http://reviewsbyamoslassen.com/?p=71102

“Williams creates a new kind of poetry that brings metaphysics and social critique together.”

* Review on Savvy Verse & Wit: https://savvyverseandwit.com/2019/05/as-one-fire-consumes-another-by-john-sibley-williams.html

“His collection seeks to tackle some of the biggest fractures in our nation, calling attention to the destruction of our country’s ideals and dreams.” 

* Interview on Rob McLennan’s blog: https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2019/03/12-or-20-second-series-questions-with.html

“In answer to the common question ‘why do you write?’, I can only say ‘I don’t know how not to.’ I make sense of the world through language. Without it, I’d be lost; I would be a different person.”

* Interview in The Reading Lists: https://www.thereadinglists.com/john-sibley-williams-interview/

“There’s a reason ‘keep writing, keep reading’ has become clichéd advice; it’s absolutely true. You need to study as many books as possible from authors of various genres and from various cultures. Listen to their voices. Watch how they manipulate and celebrate language.”

* Interview in Wilmington Town Crier: https://www.newpages.com/books/new-book-arrivals?fbclid=IwAR36ED_t5xCCpOlQa_0Hol87g39n0WtqWLGiQi09G6dh7-CQ1U2_xOlov7E

“I found myself questioning not just my country, culture, and history but nearly everything that defines me,” he said. “I struggled to faithfully explore the extent of my personal privilege as a white, CIS, able-bodied male whose labors and strains are so trifling compared to others. I wanted to stare guilt and complicity square in the eye.”

* Interview in The Idaho Press-Tribune: https://www.idahopress.com/community/life/this-poet-is-on-fire-a-q-a-with-john/article_fd034881-7106-5d3e-933d-bca11885962d.html

 “We are fortunate to live in an age when poets from diverse countries, backgrounds and beliefs are fairly accessible and, beyond that, celebrated by the larger literary community. It wasn’t long ago that only those with the privileged status of white, male, cisgender, and English-speaking could gain the audience they deserve.”