Tyrone Williams • The Hero Project of the Century

Tyrone Williams’ deftly wrought collection, The Hero Project of the Century, checks out cultural inscription and civic intersections with dynamic, extrapolative surges. His gorgeously rich critique is a desyncronization of imperialism’s enervated ideological spin. Ratcheted-up syntax is attuned to tensions, volumes and dimensions within and sliding through sociological grids. Williams articulates the crux of entropy, foreclosure and exacerbation with agility, grace and resilience. From these intensified relations, a reinvigorated life force emerges, lyrically.
   • Brenda Iijima

These pre-c.c. posts stream to us from some point prior to predication. It’s a place Tyrone Williams has been exploring on our behalf for a good, long time, beamed up, as it were, from some Ohio of the spirit, sending his missives back to us here on planet Grammar, a place of our own constant care and making where meanwhile means dissent. These are poems that teach us how to read them, or rather, teach us the deep structures that we didn’t know we knew. Take, for just one instance, the perfectly rhymed, perfectly logical line, “X ne YHWH.” The un-accented “ne”-sayer marks the places the vowels should go, the Xed out spot the tongue should find in history, the unspeakable languages of our own territorial claims. That’s a lot of work for one line to do, but that’s in the nature of scripture. Tyrone Williams has been hard on the case on our behalf. We owe him at the least a collective thank-you post-it.
   • Aldon Nielsen

This is a brilliant book. In these poems, Tyrone Williams slants away from definition and memoir, teasing us with a detail or an anecdote and then slipping names, slipping markers—the news, tradition, religion, art and history—unravel into dualities, redundancies, shadows, veils, slights of hand. In The Hero Project of the Century, Williams reveals the news we need to hear. The American chasing after the big S Capital Self is a project that can never be fulfilled. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but after the clapping is over, there is this empty space and Williams, like an abstract jazz musician, has taken us there, deftly, cutting through the terrain of emotion and intellect.
   • Barbara Henning