The Willies

THE BOOK: The Willies 

PUBLISHED IN: 2020.

THE AUTHOR:  Adam Falkner

THE EDITOR: Hanif Abdurraqib 

THE PUBLISHER: Button Poetry

SUMMARY: In this tender and fierce debut, Adam Falkner offers a new portrait of the journey into queerhood and masculinity in America. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete. Through snapshots of “Willies,” both tragic and humorous, merciless and humane, these poems ask us to give name to what scares us most. And to consider who we may become if we do not.

THE BACK STORY:  The book features twin narratives of a speaker’s journey into queerhood parallelled by a father’s descent into addiction and alcoholism. The book is really about the various costumes, or, “Willies,” worn by both a son and his father on their respective paths to mask their own traumas with masculinity, and the triumph that is earned when they make the decision to stop running and engage with their lives. 

WHY THIS TITLE?: (Implied in the above description?) 

REVIEW COMMENTS: Amazon comments/reader reviews here. Other support reviews/blurbs below. 

Adam Falkner is a poet with a heart of gold and a spine of steel. We need his prophetic voice in these bleak times. — Dr. Cornel West, author of Race Matters

In these urgent and sometimes mysterious poems, Falkner traces questions of identity, family, love and the self. His language is angular and surprising, his content intimate and profound. — Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

I am thankful for the incisive mind and eye of Adam Falkner. In the poems, the work of balancing several selves at once is done gently, deftly, and with the brilliance of someone curious about how limitless they can become. — Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Fortune for Your Disaster

Adam Falkner has heard what hums at the marrow of men who deceive themselves in order to survive America. — Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight For Out Lives

This is truth that changes the air it reaches. This is poetry that, damn it, you can’t shake. — Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler

AUTHOR PROFILE: Website here.

Dr. Adam Falkner is a poet, educator and arts & culture strategist. He is the author of The Willies (Button Poetry, 2020) and Adoption (Winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award), and his work has appeared in a range of print and media spaces including on programming for HBO, in the New York Times, and elsewhere. A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Adam is the Founder and Executive Director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative, the Dialogue Arts Project, and was the featured performer at President Obama’s Grassroots Ball at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration. He holds a Ph.D. in English and Education from Columbia University.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: This was a book I hadn’t read. If I had been given a book or an encounter — it didn’t necessarily need to be a poem — that allowed me to see queerness as something beyond the small spaces it had been relegated to in my life, it would have enabled me to marry all of the various costumes I was trying on and running from much earlier. It would have allowed me to see cultural appropriation and the desire to step outside of my own life immediately as not just one where I was scared of whiteness and scared of privilege, but one as deeply connected to an unsettling itch around being queer in the world. It wasn’t even something I allowed myself to entertain the possibility of. So the story is not unlike a lot young boys, especially those raised in cis, white ways in this country.

I hope this book draws young readers who will give themselves permission to embrace the wonderful, contradictory multitudes they carry. I’d want to let them know it’s okay to be more than one thing at one time. That might mean they’re queer and if it does, that’s beautiful.Congratulations, you’ve won the lottery! If it doesn’t mean that, that’s okay. But any work we’re doing to help young boys stay open to the various selves they feel they want to become, the healthier we’re making the world. That is a story I’m trying to chip away at with this.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: Here is the Amazon link, with “Look Inside” feature. 

LOCAL OUTLETS: Local independent opportunities for purchase. 

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: www.ButtonPoetry.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble.  

PRICE:  $16

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: 
website: www.adamfalknerarts.comig: adam_falkner