Rigoberto González on William Billiter

Billiter’s canvas is a landscape with porch swings, grackles, rural roads too familiar with car accidents, and citizens with names like Uncle Ersel and Gethsemane. The town mentioned prominently is Shinbone (with a reference to taking the mail-train to Mobile, Alabama), though the imagination and knowledge of the young speaker (who spends much of his time dreaming and exploring with pals Willy, Stinky and Soup) takes him as far as Tierra del Fuego, the Red Sea, to the image of a Persian girl lifting her veil.