The Salt Before the Sea

There are encounters the body understands long before the mind can explain them.

Before the horizon appears, there is already salt upon the skin.

Before love finds its language, the body has already answered.

In The Salt Before the Sea, MM Williams continues the evolution of his distinctive poetic voice, Mineral Lyricism-a poetry rooted not in abstraction but in the physical world, where stone, weather, flesh, wind, and tide become the grammar through which desire, memory, and transformation are understood.

These poems reject ornament in favor of presence. They move beyond romantic idealization toward a more intimate truth: that another person is never created by our longing, our praise, or our metaphors. Before we see them, they have already been shaped by rain, labor, solitude, sunlight, and time.

The sea is not scenery here.

It is law.

Again and again, these poems ask what can truly cross the water. An epic burdened by death sinks beneath its own weight. A temple sealed against the world must eventually break open. Lovers discover that intimacy requires not possession but freedom. Ruins become thresholds through which the horizon can finally be seen.

Written in Williams's signature Coastal Cadence-short lyrical movements separated by tides of white space-each poem unfolds like a wave: arriving, pausing, receding, and leaving behind a deeper recognition.

Sensual yet restrained, philosophical yet grounded in the body, The Salt Before the Sea is a meditation on love, attention, permeability, and the quiet courage required to meet another person without trying to possess them.

These are poems about what remains after illusion has been washed away.

About the body before the metaphor.

About the shore that begins wherever we truly pay attention.

If Salt Sinks Into Salt was a book of return, The Salt Before the Sea is a book of becoming-of the moment before recognition, when the world has already entered us and we have not yet found the words to say why.