Sweet Husk was the winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and a finalist for the 2015 Virginia Library Award for Poetry. To order a copy from the publisher, visit Perugia's site. To order directly from the author or request a signed copy, use the contact form.
Reviews
The measure of Corrie Williamson's Sweet Husk is an "abacus of bone," the poet clearly concerned with "the earth's dark draft" of what goes "early to ash." But hers is not a narrow view, and the myriad points of view she employs - of archaeologist, anthropologist, and poet - are informed by history, science, and poetry itself. Williamson's is an amazing accomplishment, and I, among many I suspect, will long lean in to listen to the rare old soul that tells me: "I buy Ball jars. I root / cellar, I hoard, I shotgun. I'll bury in the yard." - Claudia Emerson
In her splendid debut, Sweet Husk, Corrie Williamson is multiple in her identities: anthropologist of imagination, archaeologist of the heart, naturalist observing the world with acuity and praising it with a dense music ("thick barbs of pink thistle"). No wonder these poems, like "your luminous body will / combust automatically." With a deft ear and a sharp eye, Williamson probes the mysteries of this world and they sing under her scrutiny. - Gregory Orr
In Sweet Husk, Corrie Williamson plumbs all manner of chthonic, bone-garden tomb-womb-rooms in search of "the places that mend us." With the gypsy foot of a pilgrim and the palimpsestic, salvaging sensibility of an archaeologist, Williamson is especially attuned to secrets exchanged in our most liminal, littoral, ecotone zones. A husk is an emptied house, but to husk means to reveal something essential. These arresting poems show us the stories "worlds within worlds"; each sings beside the grave truth it illuminates. - Lisa Russ Spaar