I Am the Most Dangerous Thing
I Am the Most Dangerous Thing
Candace Williams
Finalist: The 2024 Housatonic Book Award for Poetry
Winner of a Silver Nautilus Book Award
Recommended by Vogue
Over the course of these poems, the Black, queer protagonist begins to erase violent structures and fill the white spaces with her hard-won wisdom and love. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing doesn't just use poetry to comment on life and history. The book is a comment on writing itself. What have words done? When does writing become a form of disengagement, or worse, violence? The book is an exercise in paring the state down to its true logic of violence and imagining what can happen next. There are many contradictions—Although the protagonist teaches the same science that was used to justify enslavement and a racial caste system, she knows she will die at the hands of science and denies the state the last word by penning her own death certificate. As an educator and knowledge worker, she is an overseer of the same racist, misogynistic, and homophobic systems that terrorize her. Yet, she musters the courage to kill Kurtz, a primordial vision of white terror. She is Black and queer and fat and angry and chill and witty and joyful and depressed and lovely and flawed and an (im)perfect dagger to the heart of white supremacist capitalism.
May 2023
ISBN: 9781949944525
Available in both print and digital formats.
Candace Williams is a poet and interdisciplinary artist. I Am the Most Dangerous Thing (Alice James Books, 2023) is their debut full-length poetry collection. Candace earned their Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from Claremont McKenna College and Master of Arts in Education from Stanford University. They grew up in the Pacific Northwest and found love and poetry in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Candace lives and makes art in New England.
Additional Praise:
“I Am the Most Dangerous Thing is a debut collection that confronts violent structures, especially those that perpetuate misogyny, antiblackness, and homophobia, by amplifying and complicating a lyric “I” capable of supposition, disruption, and becoming.”
—Asa Drake, The Adroit Journal
“I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, the debut full-length collection from Candace Williams, is a layered exploration of the systems that work to suppress queer Black lives in America. Williams puts their background in philosophy and politics on full display, thoughtfully navigating complex structures of racism, homophobia, and misogyny. They engage these structures with a multitude of formal and experimental techniques, patiently and determinedly pushing back against the violences exacted on their body and bodies like theirs.”
—Ronnie K. Stephens, The Poetry Question
“I Am the Most Dangerous Thing is a marvel of a collection. These poems walk a unique and exhilarating line between patient and urgent, quotidian and weighted, immediate and archival; drawing forward history’s ghosts even while rewriting and reframing them. Candace Williams is wildly intelligent and effortlessly multifaceted, approaching each line with delicacy, absolutely no nonsense, and a deep understanding of how each moment teems with historical poignancy; the choice to nurture or dismiss each other.”
—Morgan Parker
”Candace Williams’ I Am the Most Dangerous Thing is a song of deeply felt living cut through with history. By history. ‘I must suppress / the savage custom / of eloquence,’ they write, though their formal dexterity and sonic virtuosity are everywhere apparent. These poems engage with hundred-year-old newspaper articles, quantum physics, legal documents, epigenetics. Like all great teachers, Williams illuminates, complicates, and provokes. It’s impossible for a book this expansive to feel so considered, so whole. And yet here it is, in our hands—Williams made it for us. What a gift, what an occasion for gratitude!”
—Kaveh Akbar
"Candace Williams is a bold new voice in American letters. These poems are a benediction for a lost and fallen world, deeply grounded in the realities of living under white supremacy while keeping a clear eye for the promise of peace on the horizon."
—Kaitlyn Greenidge
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