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In The Drowning House, John Sibley Williams grapples with ghosts, the predators outside and in, those closer than our own hearts. In American landscapes haunted by nooses and wolves, burning crosses and floods, Williams holds a light before his path. These are keen-edged poems, kneeling before us, asking forgiveness for what our ancestors have done and have had to live through. He offers himself as a sacrifice for our sins: "here, love, is the tree of my body // to learn to climb. Far from here. From me. To touch / whatever's still up there, beautifully above us." 

- Philip Metres

On every page of The Drowning House, you’ll find deftly crafted stanzas, radiant imagery, and muscular music. John Sibley Williams is a gifted poet who, in this book, refuses to turn away from injustice. He makes visible the darkness that connects us, that divides us. This is work that troubles the page. This is risky but vital work.

- Eduardo Corral

In the dark and shifting world of The Drowning House, Williams dives deep to try to understand the ghosts of our country and our history - the violence inherent in displacement, in wiping away. These poems that populate this doomed architecture reach out in every direction to try to find purchase on truths that often shift as quickly as the tides.

- John A. Nieves, judge

“The impeccable Oregon poet John Sibley Williams is at it again, riveting as ever. His latest offering, The Drowning House, winner of The Elixir Press Poetry Award, proves why he is one of our state’s most important voices. The poet is a master craftsman.

These poems are not always easy reads. The truths they reveal require a fair amount of reckoning, but the poet who once stated in an interview, “I just can’t tell if I’m not loving enough, or loving too much, and what the full consequences are to either,” still seems to possess one thing that might feel nearly unreachable these days: hope.”

* Review in The Oregonian : https://www.oregonlive.com/books/2022/04/celebrate-national-poetry-month-with-these-4-oregon-poets.html

“This intense and beautiful book seems to be the writer’s “self-portrait” with those tortured, lied to, shunned, betrayed, incarcerated, enslaved, detained, and murdered. While, in this book, he may not fully or directly examine his own inner experience, these poems stand as the embodiment of the attempt to identify with those unlike him—or us”

* Review in Tupelo Quarterly: https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/uncategorized/sometimes-america-breaks-our-hearts-a-review-by-alice-b-fogel/

“The Drowning House is an exquisite enactment of the poetic power to re-narrate and recontextualize history’s ebb and flow on the local, personal, and national levels. Williams attends to the beauties and tragedies of the American experience, dwelling with its complexity and irreducibility.”

* Review in Los Angeles Review: https://losangelesreview.org/the-drowning-house-by-john-sibley-williams-review-by-shannon-k-winston/

“The Drowning House is a book about personal, cultural, and generational trauma. It explores American violence, racism, and colonialism, telling multiple stories from a variety of perspectives about the intersecting traumas inflicted by this country’s people, as well as the myths that have given rise to and sustained those acts of violence. The collection also navigates a minefield of culpability, responsibility, and potential atonement, acknowledging that there are no easy answers to or escape from all the damage that’s been and continues to be done.”

* Review in The Pedestal: https://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/john-sibley-williams-the-drowning-house-reviewed-by-vivian-wagner/

“Alert to social consciousness while remaining intensely private, these poems disturb; reading them, however, we sense the motivation beyond a straightforward need to inform. A Drowning Housecalls us to wake up from our self-induced stupor and contend with the consequences of the past. Don’t ignore this, Williams tells us. Break through the dullness. Look closer.”

* Review in PRISM: https://prismmagazine.ca/2022/01/13/the-ghosts-of-history-a-review-of-john-sibley-williams-the-drowning-house/

“This collection deals with the sins of a nation, the ghosts that will not be denied. Sins unacknowledged and unexplored but that remain and fester. These poems are disturbing and powerful, expressions of the revenance of violence – the inability to bury it without ever looking it in the face – ghosts that can only be exorcised through repentance -individual, generational, systemic.”

* Review in Sacred Chickens: https://www.sacredchickens.com/sacred-chickens-blog/review-of-the-drowning-house

The Drowning House digs deep into masculinity’s myths and confronts its history of violence and of atrocities committed against people of different backgrounds. It is a look at America’s past that is coming into the light and begs us to reckon with it, acknowledge it, and move forward with forgiveness and compassion.

* Review in Savvy Verse & Wit: https://savvyverseandwit.com/2022/05/the-drowning-house-by-john-sibley-williams.html