Visionary, charged with tense grace, Crystal Williams’ new collection Detroit as Barn is an extraordinary act of redemption. Language becomes fact, agency, and what it makes is real as brick. More real: Williams’ desperate and ecstatic poetry takes us beyond Simulacrum Detroit, the stage-set of crisis capitalism, to the human landscape of absolute potential and contingency.

Williams’ aim is to reclaim a world, knowing that the signposts have been deliberately mislabeled—“history is nothing more/than a chronic transfer of limitations,/a way of understanding/who we might have been & who we are/is bodies born of shackles.” Williams’ taut lines are wild to intervene, to create new forms.

This book is a journey, from the stunted myths we inhabit towards a city still to be acknowledged, a city of living women and men.