Socrates is Mortal

Author: Stephen Williams

Publisher: Dos Madres (2025)

If Socrates Is Mortal weren’t a textbook example of a syllogism (All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore), it might be the title of a situational comedy set somewhere deep in Pascal’s “eternal silence of infinite spaces.” Minor poetic genres—the epigram, the song, the fable, the fragment, the joke, the imagistic aperçu, the spell—converge in a grotesque carnival of expirations and nativities. The book’s five sets of poems—“Dead End / Ad Infinitum”; “Don’t Move”; “Phosphorescent Fiction”; “Click”; and “Origin Pit”—move through openings in history, myth, popular culture, public and private life, language, and logic itself, while its recursive structures seek to restore a distinction between tragedy and farce.