Fiona Williams holds a BSc (Hons) in Biological Sciences from the University of Westminster and an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Originally from South-East London, she now lives with her family on the Somerset Levels, and much of her work focuses on rural diversity and the relationships between identity and place.

The Novel is: THE HOUSE OF BROKEN BRICKS A

Tess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in the city to the English countryside, where predatory birds hover over fields, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider, and no one looks like her.

As Tess and Richard settle in, the dramatic arrival of their fraternal twins--one who presents as black and the other as white--recasts the family dynamic, stirring up complicated feelings and questions of belonging. Tess yearns for the comforting chaos of life as it once was, instead of Max and Sonny tracking dirt through the kitchen where cooking Caribbean food becomes her sole comfort. And Richard obsesses over getting his crops planted rather than deal with the conversation he cannot bear to have.

Ama Codjoe is a poet, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed as the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self.

Codjoe’s poems explore how the archetype of the artist complicates the typical expectations of be gazed upon, be silent, be selfless, reproduce. Dialoguing with and through art, Bluest Nude considers alternative ways of holding and constructing the self. From Lorna Simpson to Gwendolyn Brooks to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, contemporary and ancestral artists populate Bluest Nude in a choreography of Codjoe’s making. Precise and halting, this finely wrought, riveting collection is marked by an acute rendering of highly charged emotional spaces.

Purposefully shifting between the role of artist and subject, seer and seen, Codjoe’s poems ask what the act of looking does to a person—public looking, private looking, and that most intimate, singular spectacle of looking at one’s self. What does it mean to see while being seen? In poems that illuminate the tension between the possibilities of openness and and its impediments, Bluest Nude offers vulnerability as a medium to be immersed in and, ultimately, shared as a kind of “There are as many walls inside me / as there are bones at the bottom of the sea,” Codjoe writes in the masterful titular poem. “I want to be seen clearly or not at all.” “The end of the world has ended,” Codjoe’s speaker announces, “and desire is still / all I crave.” Startling and seductive in equal measure, this formally ambitious collection represents a powerful, luminous beginning.

FIONA WILLIAMS and AMA CODJOE in conversation with Karis McPherson, BEYOND BOUNDARIES 18