Todd F. Williams
Chapbook
Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (2021)
"Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear" is the winner of the South Dakota State Poetry Society's annual chapbook contest and the first chapbook of poetry by Todd Williams, a longtime South Dakota journalist who now works in the Middle East and writes poetry in his free time. The book, first published through the South Dakota State Poetry Society in October 2021, is also available through the author.
Order here
Words about Words (Reviews & Praise)
The poems in “Objects Are Closer Than They Appear” explore childhood, aging, and loss through the convex lens of memory. Each poem is a reckoning, an attempt to close the ever-widening gap between the past and the present. Todd Williams writes that old highways “offer no passage to the past.” Instead, it is through these poems filled with candy cigarettes, a 1986 Ford Escort, a father’s old socks, blizzards, and road trips through South Dakota and adjacent states that the reader is transported in time.
— Avery M. Guess, author of The Patient Admits
"Objects in the Mirror are Closer Than They Appear,” is a stunning work. The poems unfurl with an elegant rhythm, exploring family, childhood, and aging through the restless vista of memory. With an observant eye for flickering moments in time, Williams writes with scenic verve, easily conjuring nostalgia and joy, grief and hope, in assured, crystalline language. It is not often I read a collection of poetry and feel that I have experienced a true insight into what it means to live an examined life, but in Williams’ work that is what there is: recollection without sentimentality, pondering without pretense.
— Natasha Burge, author of Drifts and The Way Out
