About the Book:

Written in the wake of her mother’s passing, Frost Warning traces the tender work of learning to live after loss. These poems linger in the rhythms of cooking, gardening, cleaning, marriage, and motherhood, while also opening to the changed bond with a newly widowed father. In these pages, the smallest tasks of daily life—laying a table, tending a garden, sweeping a floor—become both echoes of absence and doorways into new ways of being. At once intimate and expansive, the collection is a meditation on family, love, and the quiet persistence of grief as it slips back into view when least expected.

Advance Praise:

“Peonies” might be my favorite poem in Williams’ Frost Warning. It starts out with a lesson between mother and daughter––that the flowers rely on the ants to open their buds. That lesson seems easy enough to understand, an unquestionable fact to live by. But the narrative of the poem unfolds differently. The lesson becomes one of disappointment, loss of innocence, and sad observance, the lesson being that life isn’t as it was promised. Like so many poems in this riveting collection, what starts as an ordinary day-to-day experience secured in routine, starts to unravel, making the challenge for the speaker how to make sense of the jolting realities of unfulfilled longing and loss.

–Jane Ann Devol Fuller, author of Half-Life

It is so sacred when a person cracks themselves open to the world, offers their raw and honest heart and so much of what it holds. Williams does just that with her new collection, tenderly guiding us through retellings of childhood, motherhood, marriage, and grief. Reader, these are true love poems––the real kinds––the kinds that steal our breath before pulling an exhalation that only comes from immense relief that happens when someone puts words to thoughts, beliefs, and experiences we think are unshared. Frost Warning is beautifully crafted, full of yearning, and above all––so deeply human. 

––Stephanie Kendrick, author of In Any of These Towns
2023/2024 Athens, Ohio, Poet Laureate

As Maya Angelou wisely said, “Easy reading is damn hard writing,”––apt words when considering Kristine Williams’ powerful and accessible first full-length book of poems, Frost Warning. In this collection of universal grievances that enhances both the narrator’s and readers’ understanding of limitations and possibilities, Williams pulls you into metaphors you have no idea you are entering, metaphors found right there in the stuff of life: glitter after a wedding, cords tangled on a chair.  The devil is in the details, after all, and let’s face it: that’s where we find meaning. The precision of her language, again in the details (“a life clearly bifurcated, / like lightening-struck trees, / alive still, / but twisted / with the effort / of growing around the wound”), speaks to Williams’ powers of observation and awareness of what those details symbolize. Once you read Frost Warning, you, too, will arrive at a new understanding of what the particulars of your life reveal.

––Deni Naffziger, author of Strange Bodies

In Frost Warning, poet Kristine Williams strives for a sense of equilibrium as she grieves the loss of her mother. Like empty rooms in a home once fully occupied, absence haunts this collection; present and past hold fast to each other. Williams’ spare, vivid poetry offers a hard-earned wisdom for readers, the weight of what can’t be forgotten, the weight “of broken things,” what we carry and what is beyond our ability to repair.  

––Bonnie Proudfoot, author of Household Gods