The Wages of Love
Christie Max Williams
North Street Book Prize 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Poetry
Critique by Jendi Reiter
The Wages of Love, a poetry collection by Christie Max Williams, is a polished collection with a unified voice, drawing on themes of fathers and sons, marital eros, and an older man's perspective on the romantic fantasies of his youth.
His poems are able to pause time and suspend fear in encounters with death or near-death, for long enough to observe the strange loveliness of the scene with a detached eye. For example, in the luminous first poem, "The Beauty of Drowning in Southern California," he recollects a near-disaster in a swimming pool in his childhood. The reader's dread arises precisely from the protagonist's lack thereof.
Similarly, in "First Blood," the child sees the debris of a car accident on the way home from church (a detail that feels significant, but is wisely not belabored by the author). The poem captures that charmed ignorance of young people growing up in safe circumstances—the unexamined conviction that mortality does not apply to you or anyone you love, and therefore you are free to focus on the pretty colors of blood on broken glass. Here, unlike in the swimming-pool poem, he's old enough to watch that conviction shatter, but still experiences the thrill of new knowledge as sublime rather than dreadful. "I did not understand to be afraid."
The coming-of-age poems in this first section draw their energy from that gap between what the young person knew and what the mature poet sees in retrospect. "Prayer in Berkeley" and "Goethe in California," two wry and sweet poems about a young man's bumbling attempts at romance, move deftly between narrative reconstruction of the past and the present-day commentary. Williams is equally good at writing erotic verses that are both sensual and respectful. "Naked," addressed to his wife, reminded me of Renaissance love poems:
Naked you lie speckled in the sun,
like a too ripe peach dropped from a high limb,
split open, juices leaking, flesh undone,
your fertile pit imagining its fragrant climb.
The Wages of Love includes several sonnets that have irregular meter and number of feet, but are otherwise conventional in style and sentiment. I realize that anything with 14 lines gets called a sonnet in contemporary poetry, but I am an old-fashioned crank. I feel that the poem should demonstrate a conscious reason to break with the form, or else it comes across as merely unpolished.
By contrast, the multi-page narrative poems at the book's end are a perfect place to showcase surprise rhymes and varied line lengths. These techniques give "Ballad of Bob and Babs" and "Bistro du Nord" a jazz-like improvisational rhythm that propels them forward.
The physical book was attractive with an androgynous portrait on the cover in shades of red, harmonizing with the theme of love in all its forms. Interior formatting was professional and without distracting errors. The Wages of Love is a collection that stands out for its introspection and sensitivity of feeling.
Read an excerpt from The Wages of Love (PDF)
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