Disinheritance investigates how poetry can both be made out of language and escape it. Like a snake eating itself, Williams’ lines often turn back on themselves, admitting that their bodies are made out of English while also refusing to be.

Disinheritance is an epic cannonade of grief that echoes with the howls of the bereaved and the callous innocent whispers of the dead. Reading it will wring your heart right out of your chest. Grief can be overwhelming and terrifying, and Williams isn’t letting anyone out the exits without a heartscorch. Disinheritance is a pained pleasure, compelling as it is discomforting. This is wicked good writing.

At once ambitious and enigmatic, these poems are charged with a mysterious energy bordering sometimes on the untranslatable. The kinetic strength of the energy itself coupled with the dark mysteries of blood and bone that permeate these charged “stories” in verse, merge the work as a whole into a memorable exploration of mutability and loss.

Disinheritance contains passages of intense beauty. It is a self-portrait of a poet in grief, emotions rubbed raw by personal tragedy. It seeks to find the words for the times when words most fail us. Disinheritance can stand with the likes of “Death, be not proud” by John Donne and “Kaddish” by Allen Ginsberg.

…this best exemplifies the brilliance of Disinheritance. Despite the grief in his poems, Williams always leaves us with something more to chew on. There is a universality and a balance in his poems. There is mourning and perseverance; assurance and uncertainty; a definite struggle and a possible resolution. But as Williams said it best: “It is good, this struggle.”

You can see this is a powerful poet and he proves, over and again, his poetry is an intense colloquy with death. There’s no morbidity, however there is a shattering recognition of ruin – and the faint beauty of its resurrection.