Wager

by Adele Elise Williams

Wager, Adele Elise Williams’s raucous debut, celebrates the fearlessness and determination that can be wrested from strife. Early on, Williams confronts multiple challenges, both personal and communal, including persistent childhood anxieties and stunning neighborhood tragedies (“Ray down the street hung / himself like just-bought bananas needing time”). In the working-class communities she moves among, the poet tangles with her perceived failures as a wayward daughter, recovering addict, and skeptical scholar as she buries friends and lovers along the way. Self-possession is so hard-won in the southern gothic world of Williams’s poems, no wonder the speaker here is so roaringly audacious while often taking relish in getting close to the “Sometimes God says YAHTZEE and I know this means / someone has won but someone has lost too — a holy man / is a gambling man, and that God of ours, / he takes bets after all.” Through it all, Williams pays homage to her lineage of resilient “beast women” and defiantly resists any constraint as she prods her own limits.

Genres: Poetry

95 pages, Paperback

Published February 16, 2024

About the author

Adele Elise Williams is the author of WAGER selected by Patricia Smith for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Series. She is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston where she serves as Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. With Dana Levin, Adele is co-editor of Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master.

Reviews

[Dorsey Craft · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fresh, playful language and slyly nuanced poems about gender, class, and the South. Favorite poems included “I Don’t Know How to Write Pretty Poems,” “With Darlings,” “With Enemy,” “Fieldnotes,” and “Plath and Prism.” Astonishing debut.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Voice of a generation

[Sean Carroll · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely love Adele's poetry. Some sexy, some sad, but always real and heartfelt. This is poetry with dirt under its fingernails.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

cw: addiction, suicidal ideation, risk seeking behavior

bracing, gorgeous language here.

“everyone has a weakness bucket in their body / and mine is brimming”

“whenever something went hysterically wrong / Mom used to say / God / is punishing you / it was supposed to be a joke / but God punished me / all / the / time”

“I don’t believe I am lovely, but I am / tender and trying”

“we are only as good as our most violet flaw”

[Pritha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unreal! Everyone should read this. Everyone should subject themselves to the beauty and wonders of this poet ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

[Maria Hiers · Rating 5 out of 5]

love Adele love this book!

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…OH fields, let's consider frost. think birches.
think snow-roads. think desert places.
OH frost and your filthy woodpile, your murderous
shovel, taking all the fields for your own…”

[Carolyn Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, love, love this debut. Features dark, edgy, self-deprecating humor to relay Southern feminist coming of age.