Hemlock

by Emilia Phillips

Adam Falkner is a writer, educator and PhD candidate in the English & Education program at Columbia University. His work has appeared in a range of literary and academic journals, and has also been featured on programming for HBO, NPR, BET, NBC, in The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the Founder and Executive Director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative, the Dialogue Arts Project, and Special Projects Director for Urban Word NYC, a nationally acclaimed youth literary arts organization. A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools and writer-in-residence at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Adam has toured the United States as a guest artist, speaker and trainer, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. He teaches at Vassar College and Columbia University’s Teachers College.

In these urgent and sometimes mysterious poems, Falkner traces questions of identity, family, love, and the self. His language is angular and surprising, his content intimate and profound.
Andrew Solomon

Adam Falkner’s long-anticipated chapbook startles & shimmies & sorrows & shakes & exclaims! The subjects in Adoption are as multiply realizable as the word itself—these poems take their narrative scalpel & magnifying glass to the family, mental health, loss, coming out, and desire all while prioritizing the beauty of the language: ‘Teach me to land. Take me into your fold. Flock. Mouth.’ This book sings!
sam sax

Poem after poem, line after line, Falkner writes a ladder into—and out of—the intricacies of desire, family, silence, inheritance. Father-grief and father-love shine everywhere. Each line the measure of effortful reckoning turned into ink and sound. Into a tenderness examined and worked for, he considers the ways we devastate one another daily but also the ways we might be opened into love.
Aracelis Girmay

Genres: Poetry

Perfect Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

About the author

Emilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed Adam's work for a while now. This is the first of his written works I've read, though. It's a short little chapbook of poems about fathers, family, sexuality and identity. It's a quick read in terms of length, but each poem demands time. Enjoyable and beautiful.

[Jennifer Walsh]

Outstanding, powerful poetry- he must have had a great 8th grade English teacher! :)