Dancing on the X

Todd Williams' Dancing on the X is a journey into the heart of the American experience, filtered through the lens of a Generation X childhood and the disorienting passage into midlife. This compelling debut collection captures the bittersweet ache of nostalgia, the weight of history, and the search for meaning in a world increasingly defined by noise and illusion.

Divided into three sections, the collection guides the reader through a landscape of memory and modern reality. Opening with the sweeping and side-eyed epic "America, Maybe," William's begins by grappling with the nation's complex mythology-its promises, failures, and enduring, fractured beauty. He then pivots to the personal, evoking a youth spent in the shadow of Mount Rushmore, where wonder was found in tourist traps like "The Cosmos," family vacations in a '73 Datsun, and the shared cultural touchstones of "The Beatles vs. Styx, 1981."

From the wrestling heroes of "Sunday Mornings with the Crusher" to the mixtapes buried in basement boxes, Williams excavates the artifacts of a generation raised on latchkey independence and the confident, if naive, belief that the "X on our treasure maps marked a spot safe from all the pitfalls our parents endured." Yet, these poems are not mere exercises in reminiscence. They are clear-eyed and often humorous, asking what happens when that generation grows up to find itself, like Wile E. Coyote, finally catching the Road Runner only to ask, "Now what do I do?"

The later sections, "Love in a Time of Caldera" and "A Mouthful of Moon," maturely navigate the terrain of adulthood: fatherhood in "Snow Day with Sophia," love in "Accidental Kiss," loss in "I Wear My Dead Father's Socks," and the anxieties of modern life, from pandemics to political divides in poems like "My Pandemic Face" and "Mitch McConnell Stares Out at the Sea." Williams writes with equal parts grace and grit about the "rust of frayed cartilage" and the relentless pull of everything we've ever lost, cataloged with heartbreaking specificity in "Flight 370."