Author

Lessard, William

William Lessard is the author of /face (KERNPUNKT Press, 2026). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry Daily, Beloit Poetry Journal, FENCE, and McSweeney’s. He is the Poetry and Hybrids editor at Heavy Feather Review. More about him at: www.williamlessardwrites.net.

Publications in The Rang Yan Review

Criticism

/face by William Lessard contemporary

Jonathan Hobratsch

In William Lessard’s /face, the violence of facial recognition exposes the historical continuity between imperial regimes of classification and contemporary infrastructures of surveillance, where the capture of identity reproduces the fundamental asymmetry between those who render the world legible and those rendered legible for their profit. This is a poetics of dispossession that turns the fractured architectures of digital language against the machinery of its production, demanding that we confront the political conditions under which a face can still claim sovereignty over its own existence.

  • poetry
  • criticism
  • surveillance
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Poetry

FATHER contemporary

William Lessard

The father’s body, still marked by the uniform of wage labor, becomes the point at which the ordinary world loses its continuity. The poem renders grief as a material rupture: the loss of another person is also the collapse of a future whose very possibility depended on their presence. Mourning emerges as the recognition of our fundamental interdependence.

  • poetry
  • contemporary
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