Kate Sweeney has interviewed Adele Elise Williams in the Michigan Quarterly Review.
The poet, editor, and educator Adele Elise Williams brings a radical femininity and realness to the page that is uniquely hers. WAGER, her debut release selected by Patricia Smith for the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Series, is steeped in a deep respect for tradition–both literary and familial, yet remakes formality with her distinct fingerprint while not degrading or attempting to revise centuries of tradition. Her ability to contemplate living in the complexity of all human parts that make a personhood—grit, defiance, kindness, boredom, fortitude, creativity, real language—is unique to this work. The balance of both respect and defiance is a marvel and a testament to the dichotomy of the human spirit.
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.
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.