THE BODY AFTER METAPHOR: Reel Poems

What remains when metaphor is no longer enough? In The Body After Metaphor, MM Williams turns away from the inherited machinery of romantic poetry-the moon, the sea, the stars, the grand symbolic gesture-and returns again and again to the living body. These poems begin in longing, memory, beauty, eros, absence, and projection, but they rarely stay there. A strand of hair caught in the wind, sand beneath a bare heel, a hand withdrawing, a scarf underfoot, a broken elastic, a laugh arriving at the wrong moment-ordinary details interrupt the speaker's desire to turn the beloved into myth. And that interruption becomes the revelation. Written and refined as "reel poems," these pieces are shaped by compression, silence, movement, and emotional turn. Their brevity is not minimalism for its own sake. Each poem seeks the moment when language sheds what it does not need and arrives at something more difficult: recognition. Across the collection, desire learns the limits of possession. Memory becomes physical. Beauty stops behaving like an idea. The beloved remains irreducibly herself-autonomous, particular, alive. The result is a poetry of intimacy without ownership, sensuality without abstraction, and lyric intensity stripped of ornament. The Body After Metaphor asks a simple, dangerous question: What if the real body is more astonishing than anything we could compare it to?