Open Rehearsal

Keith S. Wilson’s visually experimental poetry examines the ‘asymmetries of risk’ and repetition to expose ‘how violence enters the body as habit.’

By Jeffrey LevineMarch 5, 2026

• Poetry

THE TITLE OF Keith S. Wilson’s collection Games for Children (2025) announces something casual—even benign—yet the book itself is rigorously unsentimental. These are poems concerned not with childhood as a time for play-as-invention-and-discovery, a time when bodies absorb rules (or else) and the consequences (or else) for breaking them. The asymmetries of risk come to matter long before consent or comprehension. Wilson depicts play as training in exposure, in repetition, in how violence enters the body as habit. This is certainly not child’s play.

Dangers lurk in the shadows of the deliberately modest title. “Games” are not metaphors here, nor are they ironic cover. They are procedures: rule-bound actions whose stakes are unevenly distributed, whose outcomes are known in advance to some participants and not to others. Children, in this sense, are figures not of innocence but of vulnerability. Early on, Wilson writes a line that might serve as a quiet rubric for what follows: “often, cruelty means to look away.” Rather than an accusation, Wilson offers a diagnosis of how harm persists without spectacle.

Formally, Games for Children refuses the familiarity of traditional lyricism. The book is built from poems, diagrams, timelines, procedural texts, and visual scores—materials that resist linear development in favor of recurrence, pressure, and an astonishingly fertile visual imagination. Certain titles repeat (“Apotheosis” most conspicuously), as do historical figures and scenes—Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Colin Kaepernick—as well as unnamed boys whose bodies are subjected to spectatorship, discipline, and retroactive explanation. This is not fragmentation as aesthetic display. It is structure doing historical work. The poems do not move forward; they return, insisting that what has not been metabolized cannot be left behind.

What holds these materials together is not argument but association. Wilson’s poems think by adjacency, allowing sound, image, and register to collide without being resolved. Meaning accrues as disparate elements are forced to occupy the same space.

If Games for Children resists chronology, it is because chronology would falsely imply distance, sequence, and progress. The book’s governing intuition is that historical violence does not recede; it reorganizes the space through which bodies continue to move. History here is not a story to be told but a “geometry” to be inhabited. That logic is made explicit in “Angles of Incidence,” which replaces narrative development with spatial distortion and asks the reader to think in terms of curvature rather than causality:

see

the body is a haunt and non-euclidean
parallel paths will meet

is a tree growing down the block

is it the moon to you

nothing

a jog

an epiphany

Meaning emerges here through proximity rather than exposition. The language behaves like a schematic: fragments arranged so that collisions feel inevitable even when causality remains unspoken. In non-Euclidean space, parallel lines do not remain parallel; they bend, converge, and intersect. Wilson’s poem insists that American history operates according to the same warped physics. Events that should remain separate—past and present, as well as states of innocence and guilt or acts of movement and punishment—collapse into one another without warning. What looks like coincidence is revealed as curvature.

This spatial logic is not merely thematic; it structures the book’s movement. Throughout Games for Children, Wilson’s visual forms serve as lyric engines, treating thought itself as nonlinear movement: sentences become vectors, histories intersect, moral forces register in arcs and at angles. The diagram shifts attention away from narrative resolution and toward relational process. What results is an accounting of how power and feeling circulate.

Crucially, the poems withhold interiority. There are no motives to parse, no misunderstandings to resolve. Bodies appear as surfaces of contact—already subject to measurement, inference, and retroactive judgment. Violence often lacks intent. It requires only a system capable of assigning meaning after the impact. What matters is not what one meant but where one stood, how one moved, and how that movement was read.

Glass becomes an instructive material within the book: “i know a bird’s relationship with glass. / the blood latched up in the throat.” Glass promises transparency while enforcing separation, allowing bodies to be seen without meeting. In “Sonnet (Brown),” Wilson stages a scene of racialized self-surveillance that unfolds entirely at this threshold:

i’m thirteen. colored the color
of wet sand. muhammad they joke. i am
the hiss of other names. pedro. at home,
dad calls me june bug (for junior) and i
answer. my clothes hang like a rope.

The poem’s opening claims are all lived knowledge, not mere metaphorical flourish. Birds strike glass because it mimics openness; the danger lies precisely in its promise of passage. What follows is a catalog of bodily adjustments: shaving without looking, swallowing speech, managing breath. Even fluency becomes suspect. The speaker cannot afford hesitation; speech itself must be regulated, minimized, tucked away. The body learns to preemptively monitor itself.

What strikes equally is the absence of overt threat. No single act of violence appears. Instead, the poem documents how the body internalizes surveillance, learning to anticipate how it will be read. Rather than simply wounding directly, glass teaches avoidance. Throughout Games for Children, instruction operates this way—quietly, repeatedly, without spectacle. Knees learn where they may rest. Breath learns when it may continue. Hands learn what they may touch and how those touches will later be interpreted. The apparatus does not announce itself as violent; it presents as ordinary.

If bodies are instructed early, it is because they are being prepared—slowly and relentlessly—for civic life. Wilson’s use of “games” is therefore neither nostalgic nor ironic. Games are where rules are learned, boundaries tested, and loss normalized. They are rehearsals for lived experience. The consequences are meant to remain symbolic. One of Wilson’s central insights is how often they do not.

In one recurring passage, childhood games bleed seamlessly into national ritual and sanctioned violence:

                   patriot songs—the star-spangled banner, the nfl theme—are
                       national nursery rhymes.
           another term for firecracker is “salute” though a salute can be any
               number of explosive devices meant to bang. […]

                   hot potato treats the potato, the bomb,
        and the bean bag as if they weigh the same.
            any coward can hold a lighter but have you held the m80? ready, he
                says, get set, he says, then off we go.

“Games for children” refuse to distinguish between innocence and danger because the culture that produces these games does not make such distinctions. Patriotism, entertainment, and violence are taught using the same grammar: repetition, rhythm, call-and-response. “Hot potato” collapses the distance between plaything and weapon; “salute” names both celebration and detonation. Children learn early that the difference between a game and a catastrophe may be simply a matter of timing.

Here is a theory of citizenship grounded in indoctrination. To participate is to accept that rules exist while offering no protection. The same gestures—running, kneeling, holding—are encouraged, applauded, or punished depending on who performs them and who is watching. Spectatorship is not secondary to the game; it is what determines the outcome. Meaning is assigned after the fact by institutions for which neutrality is a posture, not a practice.

A book as formally demanding as Games for Children risks being read as willfully difficult, its repetitions mistaken for excess rather than intention. But Wilson refuses to allow the reader the relief of proficiency. As one poem puts it, “the story as we tell it / ends sooner than it has to end.” These poems repeatedly refuse that premature ending. Games for Children traffics neither in catharsis nor in moral uplift. Even the tonal restraint is a resistance to aestheticizing harm or equating exposure with redemption. Moments of lyric intensity are tempered by self-restraint, pulled back from the brink of spectacle:

whatever wonder you might’ve thought
was happening, you saw, instead, was just your heart,
or imagination, or the little difference
between them.

These poems do not ask to be admired for their courage or rigor; they insist on being endured. Wilson manages to hold interior life at arm’s length. Bodies are acted upon, positioned, instructed, and read, but rarely opened from the inside. This severity may narrow the emotional range at moments, but it is also the book’s ethical commitment. To open the interior too readily would risk implying that understanding resolves what procedure sustains.

Wilson does not promise that witnessing is enough to transform the conditions he describes, nor that naming violence will decrease violence. These poems do not strive for understanding but recognize the urge for resolution. In this sense, reading Games for Children is a visual rehearsal for the lives we are already living—an exercise in sustained attention without closure. Wilson’s poems do not ask to be decoded, mastered, or redeemed. Rather, they invite us to remain where the rules are already in play, and to notice how much is learned there before anyone calls the game.