Wager

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