The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Wager, by Adele Elise Williams, a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, selected by Patricia Smith.
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 edge: “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.
“You will not, under any circumstances, be able to resist reading every other single word of every other single poem aloud,” warns Smith, “relishing the rollick, the swiveling syntax, the familiar rendered oh-so-gloriously unfamiliar, the snap-crackle, the profound and the puckish.”
Adele Elise Williams is a PhD student in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston and a former executive pastry chef. She is co-editor (with Dana Levin) of Bert Meyers: On the Life and Work of an American Master. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications and received multiple honors, including the 2023 Inprint Marion Barthelme Prize in Creative Writing.
Wager will be published in the spring of 2024.