Dustin Williamson is a poet and small-press publisher whose writing uses fragments, sound, broken syntax, comedy, urban speech, and compressed lyric movement. He has published chapbooks including Obstructed View, Cab Ass’n, Gorilla Dust, and Exhausted Grunts, and he founded Rust Buckle Books.
The magazine published Williamson’s Two Poems in Issue 25: a please touch museum and travel sizes. Both poems work through clipped phrases, abrupt turns, and gaps that keep grammar in motion.
Fragment and syntax
a please touch museum proceeds through short verbal units separated by slashes. The poem repeatedly interrupts its own statements, allowing phrases about television, food, clothing, photographs, bodies, and syntax to collide without settling into a single narrative.
The resulting movement depends on recurrence. Phrases return with small changes, building a rhythm in which ordinary speech becomes increasingly strange.
travel sizes
travel sizes turns air travel into a field of pressure, distance, darkness, runway weight, and thought. Its scattered spacing allows the page to hold pauses as part of the poem’s rhythm.
That attention to broken sequence and spatial pacing places Williamson beside experimental poetry that treats typography and syntax as active parts of meaning.
Small press and New York context
Williamson’s work belongs to a New York small-press culture built through chapbooks, readings, publishing, and literary communities. The Poetry Project documented his work as a poet, publisher of Rust Buckle Books, and coordinator of its Monday Night series.
Readers following this period of independent American poetry can continue through contemporary poets.
Magazine appearance
Issue 25 preserves a please touch museum and travel sizes. The surviving texts show Williamson’s interest in fracture, rhythm, contemporary diction, and the unstable boundaries between statement and association.
Past Issues places the poems within the magazine’s chronology.
Further reading
The Poetry Project preserves Williamson’s poetry and biographical note. The Brooklyn Rail records his work as a poet and publisher of Rust Buckle Books.