Selected by Patricia Smith for the Jake Adam York Prize, an unflinching, profoundly gorgeous debut collection about beauty, pain, and the resilience of the human spirit.
In the haze of gothic nightclubs, in the stark pang of childhood memories and the blurry confusion of drunken ones, darkness and light stand in a state of oppositional symbiosis: One cannot exist without the other. Recovery and the radical perspective shift that accompanies it magnify these extremes—the darkest nights, Constant Laval Williams posits, constitute one’s personhood as much as the brightest moments. Only through this duality can the poet examine a stolen childhood, a litany of loss, and what it means to be whole. “Whatever happened / to me as a child,” he writes, “I was still / a beautiful child, and a hornet nest / is still a kind of cathedral.”
A chronicle of wreckage written from a lifeboat, these poems hew beauty from shadows: “a lisp of lavender,” “a trembling clutch of stars,” “the miracle / of still being here.” They reconsider the intrinsic nature of trauma and linger willingly in the bareness of vulnerability. The speaker is reborn like “the cicada / beneath your unlit window splitting open / at the head, dragging its raw body out / into the world, to leave behind its old form.”
Christened “a raw and utterly sparkling debut” by Patricia Smith, Elegy with Beautiful Child interrogates the neglected recesses of the soul, hoisting from them unexpected, glittering gems.
Price: $18.00
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Imprint: Milkweed Editions
Publication Date:
19 January 2027
ISBN: 9781639552054
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
POETRY / American, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / General
“‘What a joy to have anything at all,’ writes Constant Laval Williams in this raw and utterly sparkling debut, an instruction manual on all the best ways to claw through grit towards whatever shines. What struck me most about Elegy with Beautiful Child is how much we need it. Everywhere we turn waits the lip of an abyss, hundreds of ways to shatter, a numbing news update, a tangling of shadows. Language now lies to us so often, and with such skill. But in these stark, revelatory poems, we’re urged to remember the perseverance of light that’s sometimes muted, but never dims to nothing. Beauty will never abandon us to hurt. Or, as the poet says, ‘a hornet nest is still a kind of cathedral.’”—Patricia Smith, 2025–26 Jake Adam York Prize Judge
Constant Laval Williams earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California, where he received the Beau J. Boudreaux Poetry Award. He currently serves as a senior reader at Ploughshares. He was a finalist for the 2025 Rhino Founders’ Prize, as well as the 2025 Ninth Letter Literary Award. He was a semifinalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2024 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and The Adroit Journal’s 2024 Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, Lana Turner, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, and many other publications. Though he is first and foremost a poet, he also has a successful career in music, touring and releasing post-punk and darkwave songs under the name Casket Cassette. He lives in Los Angeles.
