By Johnny Cate

Reading Water is absolute fire. But let’s do ourselves a favor and stay away from the term tour de force. This is an award-winning book, deservedly. It doesn’t need another nobody to validate it, but I guess it can’t hurt, right?

With 100-something pages, Derek JG Williams puts together a cohesive and cool poetic vision in this book, which was published by Lightscatter Press in 2025.

The voice is distinct and the poet’s devotion to a liquescent style of lyricism gives it a slick and appropriately fluid vibe. There’s far too much to say about it—this review will be painfully incomplete, but let’s just revel for a second.

I love the inscription from Maggie Nelson at the outset: “ . . . all words, not just some, are written in water.” This is so key for Williams’ disposition—an understanding that his poems (and all poems) are ephemera, really. Written to vanish in the flood of human existence.

It’s this steely honesty that allows Williams to move with a refreshing kind of literary insouciance. The tone continually suggests he’s not taking himself too seriously—and the poems acquire an effortless and magnetic quality as a result.

Williams fuses elegant emotional detachment with a daring involvement in the language, producing a flow all his own. From start to finish, Reading Water features a flourish and rhythm that carry the reader downstream, easily.

The book has a diggable maximalism—swagger that finds perfect moments to show off. This poet isn’t afraid to write lines that call attention to themselves, and it’s a godsend in a sea of fashionably boring work.

“Darkling With Lightning” is the perfect kickoff poem. Formally fluid, it shatters and congeals as it introduces memory as a primary theme. It’s nostalgic, boasting moments of brilliant punk flair to set the tone:

                   twilight & dusk,
                   talking shit,
                   the rich thick gloam
                   of my young dumb life . . .

Hooky lyrical play sees Williams firing off casual rhymes as his imagination gracefully maneuvers through the language. It announces the poet as a poet of perspective, and in the poems that follow, it often feels like past, present, and future are happening all at once to Williams. His “I” moves forward and backward with vivid intensity to reconsider (“remix and reprise”) the past events of his life.

But his eye is also on the future as he “can scarcely wait till tomorrow / I am not done with my changes . . . ” (“I’ve Walked Through Many Lives”). “[D]oubtless I love the years,” he writes, “their unpredictable flowering / their frailty” (“And The Years”).

That eagerness to see tomorrow, though, is tempered by his grave acknowledgement of the final destination: “—soon comes ruin,” he’ll remind us in “King of the Minotaurs.”

Without question, though, the continual highlight is having a front row seat to Williams’ performative poetic abilities. What he says isn’t necessarily as compelling as how he says it.

The construction of the language—it’s inventiveness and inspired sonics left me breathless. Poems like “Mammals” feature tastily chiseled liftoffs like this:

                   Awash on a beach
                   in Scotland, netting and debris
                   had filled, I mean killed,
                   the male whale, but
                   it was impossible to know
                   for sure the exact cause
                   of its demise.

Heel-turning rhymes, delicious assonant play, and rhythmic perfection. Williams can elegantly combine devices to create moments you want to read over and over. And despite the commitment to past reflection, it’s this lyricism that creates moments of NOW that reveal the present as the true theme of the book.

Little moments are given great significance by Williams’ lyrical powers. From “Darkening Clean Linen With Dirty Mouths”: “Last week I sucked sunburst globs // of roe from rows of seaweed-made bowls.” Then suddenly in the next poem, “Volta”: “The funk-filled jukebox thrashed, thumped. / Oh the slow neon, we were hot copper in its orbit.”

Taking these kinds of linguistic risks doesn’t seem common these days. Sometimes I just want to read poetry that’s trying to make me gawk at the gifts of the poet. In places, the derring-do in Williams’ work is dialed up to a point where the language achieves a sex appeal that’s palpable. From “The Slow Dissolve”:

                   not the rocks
                   but the hips

                   the flesh
                   flung taut

                   butterflying
                   blade stung

                   straight from
                   the waist

LFG, dude. This is the kind of madness one imagines flaming down on poets of old from some burning, heavenly muse. Blood pumping, I thought of Walt Whitman reading Williams’ all-in lines: “Unscrew the locks from the doors! // Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!” Check out this bit from “Blink”:

                                          Above, and flung

                    so much further, Jupiter’s wild—a disco ball
                    strobing pink and green like strophes on fire pulse

                    with feeling rising from a page, rising to form
                    constellations above us both.

Nuts. Or this mind-blowing moment from “Keeping Time”, recalling his dad in a car crash:

                                  A truck struck
                   the driver side of his compact car,

                   left him rattled: his bones.
                   It crunched on them,

                   made brunch of him. Hot
                   plate bacon sizzling in the red

                   car he lay dazed-in.

Just filthy. It’s appropriate, that there’s also an “Ode to the Tongue” in this book, because that’s the pleasure; it feels like Williams has tested every syllable against the tongue—it’s not just that it reads well, it feels good to say. Lines click anatomically, giving the lyrics a wild physicality that reaches a fever pitch in highlight sequence “Prize Fighter.” It’s the story of a boxer, and I couldn’t help but think of Muhammad Ali’s famous “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” line—it speaks to Williams’ poetics, in a way. He’s got a lightness of foot that can, in an instant, lead to a punch that’ll stun you. After elegantly spaced stanzas that dance with rhythmic invention, the dazzling piece ends on a thematically sound note:

                         Memory, strongest
                                of the senses, potent

                                        he drinks it—
                                 elixir that remembers

                         when he forgets
                                when he is.

From vignettes of a loved one pissing (another highlight, honestly) to recollections of mountain cows, Williams delivers this same voice and vividness throughout.

This is a life lived—and one Derek JG Williams “won’t leave without a fight.” I was made better by it. More importantly, though? I was entertained by it, and while I can’t make any guarantees what reading Reading Water will do for you, I can say this: it definitely got me wet.

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Johnny Cate is a poet, copywriter, and vintage T-shirt collector from Asheville, North Carolina. Find him on X: @johnnycate