Finalist, 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.
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.
“All sass and smarts, Adele Elise Williams’ Wager does the duende—that dance with death Lorca said all great poems risk. In life and in art, Williams meets the prospect and memory of annihilation with ferocious honesty, linguistic play, and wit. Deeply moving, deeply fun to read, Wager makes telling the hard truths a tonic.”
—Dana Levin, author of Now Do You Know Where You Are
“In Wager, Adele Elise Williams hands us a set of sharp and gleaming poems that uncover our deepest selves. Williams lets us see through to our own humanness—its intricacies, its riches, its sinews, its terrors, its glory. There is an immense kindness in these poems, as Williams navigates the ways in which knowing the self can always be scary. ‘How the most familiar thing becomes / the opposite of gentle when dead’. These poems make the known sublime with the gorgeous streamers of the unknown.”
—Dorothea Lasky, author of The Shining
“Wager bets it all: the body, language, mothers, men, writing workshops, houses. Clarifying and lacerating, Williams reminds me that poetry is the one pure thing. Especially when it burns like vodka on an open wound. ‘You are fucked if you are in love, or if you are not in love, then you / can be fucked too.” This is all I want from poems.’”
—Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders
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.”
