Controlled Hallucinations

by John Sibley Williams

Filled with impassioned logic and musicality, John Sibley Williams’ debut collection strives to control the uncontrollable by redefining the method of approach. In these compact poems, so edged in dark corners and the strenuous songs of beauty and identity, Williams establishes a unique world of contradictions and connections that bridge the foreign and the familiar. Moving through art and history, through apocalyptic visions and family, into and back out of the paradox of using language to express languagelessness, Controlled Hallucinations weaves universal themes and images with the basic human reality of touch, word, and what is lost in their translation.

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2013

About the author

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Reviews

[John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

John Sibley Williams pares down and removes the extraneous to expose what is absolutely needed: the possibilities. He bravely turns language over on its side and we are left with how things could fit back together in unexpected and elegant turns. The poems in this book repeatedly draw you to a stop with stunning insights, which will hold you long after you have put it down.

—Bonnie Nish, Executive Director Pandora’s Collective Outreach Society


In a universe written in the forms of questions, John Sibley Williams strums his fingers along finely tuned blends of thoughts and images. Enter the intimate conversations of these poems, but do not expect easy ways out. Watch out for the openings that will land you on the map of your own astonishment.

—Daniela Elza, author of milk tooth bane bone and the weight of dew


John Sibley Williams’ poems are open-ended equations without solvable components. Bleeding, blindness, the absorption of self into the world, problems of identity and continuity, the incongruity of memory and anticipation create “controlled hallucinations” that probe our existence by suspending the coordinates normally associated with the articulation of one’s reality. There is a great deal for the heart in these poems. These are skillfully composed black and white photographs, painstakingly hand-tinted.

—Andrea Moorhead, editor of Osiris


Using bones, Williams frames a place for mirrored windows and unobstructed doorways where love can come and go as it pleases. The rooms are floor-less, so photographs, clocks, bedroom walls and the staircase defy gravity. This collection has a haunting quality which makes you want to walk back into the room that you just left and search for what it is you may have missed.

—Rebecca Schumejda, author of Cadillac Men

[Daniel Klawitter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderfully spacious poems from an accomplished, generous and openhearted poet. I can tell even after a first reading that these are poems to return to, over and over again, for new illuminations.

In Short: Anyone trying to stay abreast of contemporary poetry should have a copy of Controlled Hallucinations on their book shelf. I already have several favorites, but here is one of them I particularly enjoyed:


Do not worry.
The knives I display in this poem
cannot even cut an overripe fruit.

When I thrash them wildly
or hold them to your throat, or mine,
when I threaten an old enemy
with a few unsharpened words
or dismember my own truths
slice by slice
just know
I only wish for the air around us to bleed.

[FutureCycle Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are the publisher, so all of our authors get five stars from us. Excerpts:


I.

I see a man on an adjacent building,
silhouette cut from the skyline.
So I also cut out the roof
he stands on.
I cut out the tools
and the cascading shingles.
I cut out the hydrangeas
the shingles decapitate
on their way down.

I cut out the mountain
in the distance,
still coddling its last snows,
replacing it with a silo,
the shingles with paper
snowflakes.

I replace the man
with another man
with a woman
with a horse
a piano
with a book
and myself.

Nothing quite fits.

But the man
no longer fits either
or the roof
or skyline.
And I wonder is this
what it means
to touch?


XV.

The entirety of human history
is scrawled in graffiti
on a single gray brick
trying to loosen itself
from the red wall.

Can you hear its tender body
screaming its uniqueness,
screaming its name, screaming
and settling
for a heaven to scale?

Soon I’ll know what that feels like—

my fingers losing their gray
with each honest touch,
my nameless mouth screaming
louder and louder
with each inescapable act of unity.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Using bones, Williams frames a place for mirrored windows and unobstructed doorways where love can come and go as it pleases. The rooms are floor-less, so photographs, clocks, bedroom walls and the staircase defy gravity. This collection has a haunting quality which makes you want to walk back into the room that you just left and search for what it is you may have missed.

[gautami · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the title suggests, Williams has been able to control the hallucinations. He has taken the everyday experiences and juxtaposed those with feelings, thoughts and varied images. He has taken note of life from all its aspects by making use of metaphors, some of those are unthinkable for an average reader of poetry. He does it so seamlessly and the reader craves for more. He speaks of ball of yarn, to be in love, about rooftops, mirrors, seeing people in the clouds and the blue sky, fence posts, birds and raw emotions blended with passion.
Let me take the first poem which sets the tone and that tone is maintained throughout.

I

I see a man on an adjacent building
silhouette cut from the skyline.
So I also cut out the roof
he stands on.
I cut out the tools
and the cascading shingles.
I cut out the hydrangeas
the shingles decapitate
on their way down.
.
I cut out the mountain
in the distance,
still coddling its last snows
replacing it with a silo,
the shingles with paper
snowflakes.
.
I replace the man
with another man
with a woman
with a horse
a piano
with a book
and myself.
.
Nothing quite fits.
.
But the man
no longer fits either
on the roof
on skyline
And I wonder is this
what it means
to touch?
.
The imagery is so good that one wants to keep reading.

LIX

With an apple in my mouth, yes,
I must be swine.
Because strangers stop momentarily
to capture me in their lenses,
I must be a roadside attraction.
As there is nothing to hold to
in what I say,
I say it again
And again--

nonsense being the tenderest
act of friendship, of identity.

I can be cloudburst, yes,
and I can be my own prey.
I can be you.
or, if you say it,
none of these

I especially liked the twists at the end. Because that is what I do. That is what I am. A poet.

Re-reading his poems gives yet another meaning. The knowing turns to un-knowing. From churches to graveyards, from skylines to bedrooms. From clouds to the grounds. The journey is just an illusion. Or hallucinations. Controlled or not.....open ended or closed. Understand it any way you want.

[T.L. Cooper · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Sibley Williams teases the senses and tantalizes the imagination in Controlled Hallucinations. Williams poems invite the reader to read and reread the lines that paint images one may dismiss until the next one brushes up against it. Controlled Hallucinations pushes the reader into new areas of comprehension. Williams, at times, presents strings of words that stop the readier in mid-thought waiting for the hidden revelation just on the tip of the reader's consciousness. At other times, Williams offers lines that will have the reader nodding in acknowledgement of shared experience and wondering if perhaps all of life is really just one large shared controlled hallucination.