Repair (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

"Always, "These gigantic inconceivables."

Always, "What will have been done to me?"

And so we don our mental armor,

flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should.

A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk,

though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?"

—from "Risk"

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence."

Repair is a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry and the winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.