The University of Arkansas Press is excited to announce that Wager, by Adele Elise Williams, is now available.
Wager, Adele Elise Williams’s raucous debut and a finalist for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 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.
“Adele Elise Williams’s Wager,” writes series editor Patricia Smith, “was undoubtedly crafted to upend the familiar—both narratively and sonically—and turn it into something unflinchingly fresh. Language, as some of us know, exists to be fiddled with, and Williams, a storyteller who steadfastly refuses lyrical compliance, has a grand ol’ time reintroducing us to what we assume we already know. I love a poet who runs rampant, rebelling against restraint—however, that by no means indicates a lack of discipline or a desire to cloak the work in ‘device’” These poems hit home because they pull us into the poet’s rampaging narrative, because we are all creatures of story who crave POVs that rouse us and redefine what we see.”
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.
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”