Jerry Williams

Jerry Williams lives in New York City and teaches at Marymount Manhattan College. Carnegie Mellon University Press published his collection of poems, Casino of the Sun (2003) and Admission (2010). His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Crazyhorse, New Ohio Review, Witness, and other journals. He is currently working on a memoir.

IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME: The Poetry of Breakup and Divorce (2010)

A touching, angry, and hilarious anthology of the many facets of ruptured romance

With breakup and divorce rates so high in the United States, who wouldn’t want to read an eclectic volume of poems on the subject? Therapeutic and transformative, edgy yet sincere, enlightening, wideranging, female and male, gay and straight, innocent and guilty, It’s Not You, It’s Me: The Poetry of Breakup incorporates work from as many different perspectives as possible in order to explore the exquisite pain of heartbreak. Such top-shelf contributors as National Book Award finalist Kim Addonizio, bestselling author Denis Johnson, former poet laureate Mark Strand, Edward Hirsch, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, and many others proudly offer up their wisdom on the various pains (and humors) of heartbreak. In this stunning collection, readers will not find false hope, but the real hope of genuine sympathy in love, hate, fury, and recuperation.

"This collection . . . gathers many of the poems that have helped Williams (a poet himself, with two books to his name) through his rooms of anguish over the years. Happily, they're pretty great." — The New York Times

"A fine new anthology . . . featuring terrific poets . . . Williams is as good a prose writer as he is a poet. Get hold of this guy's stuff and read it." — Entertainment Weekly

"Jerry Williams, has had some experience with romantic disappointment, as he details in his slightly painful introduction...This collection is split into three sections - 'One Foot Out the Door,' 'In the Middle of the Storm' and 'The Aftermath' - and it gathers many of the poems that have helped Williams (a poet himself, with two books to his name) through his rooms of anguish over the years. Happily, they're pretty great."—PaperCuts

"In It's Not You, It's Me: The Poetry of Breakup today's big contemporary poets make breaking up and even divorce sound painfully beautiful. You'll want to read with a box of tissues, a pint of chocolate ice cream and sappy love songs playing in the background."—Lemondrop

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