Strange Architectures

This tour through Piranesian dreamworlds is also a tour through collective desire. With a subtle clarity, Jennifer Williams shows how our fears and longings manifest in architectural fantasies: the dream home, the model workplace, the palace of wonders. The buildings of these tense lyrics are at once familiar and disturbing, the way an influencer's aspirational feed betrays what's bloodthirsty about want. Where one poem comforts or pleases, another unsettles, and another confuses, because in this oneiric logic feelings flow with less reason and more truth. By pursuing her own obsessions with skilful and restrained poetic commitment, Williams has made a very personal map that anyone can, and should, follow in order to find themselves lost.