Elegy with Beautiful Child

Selected by Patricia Smith for the Jake Adam York Prize, an unflinching, profoundly gorgeous debut collection about beauty, pain, and the resilience of the human spirit.

In the haze of gothic nightclubs, in the stark pang of childhood memories and the blurry confusion of drunken ones, darkness and light stand in a state of oppositional symbiosis: One cannot exist without the other. Recovery and the radical perspective shift that accompanies it magnify these extremes—the darkest nights, Constant Laval Williams posits, constitute one’s personhood as much as the brightest moments. Only through this duality can the poet examine a stolen childhood, a litany of loss, and what it means to be whole. “Whatever happened / to me as a child,” he writes, “I was still / a beautiful child, and a hornet nest / is still a kind of cathedral.”

A chronicle of wreckage written from a lifeboat, these poems hew beauty from shadows: “a lisp of lavender,” “a trembling clutch of stars,” “the miracle / of still being here.” They reconsider the intrinsic nature of trauma and linger willingly in the bareness of vulnerability. The speaker is reborn like “the cicada / beneath your unlit window splitting open / at the head, dragging its raw body out / into the world, to leave behind its old form.”

Christened “a raw and utterly sparkling debut” by Patricia Smith, Elegy with Beautiful Child interrogates the neglected recesses of the soul, hoisting from them unexpected, glittering gems.