Gazelle in the House

Lisa Williams’s new collection, Gazelle in the House, is truly a book of stanzas: poetic rooms in which to dwell. Some of these dwellings have the uncanny familiarity of ordinary domestic space and others are as mysterious and disorienting as the depths of the sea. Painting with colors at times opaque, at times transparent, moving between shallows, tide-pools, and the abysses of dreams, Williams's voice is solitary, meditative, intimate—and in the end a means of revelation. —Susan Stewart Like the photographer who “wants that dialogue between a singer’s gesture and what slants it,” Lisa Williams elegantly slants the space between sight and sound in her striking third collection. She plumbs the worlds of eels and deep sea bells as deftly as she conjures unsparing snapshots of female adolescence. —Rebecca Morgan Frank