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    The Willies
    The Willies
    The Willies
    Ebook90 pages53 minutes

    The Willies

    By Adam Falkner

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    2021 Midwest Book Awards - Poetry Debut Gold Medal Winner
    2020 Forewords Reviews INDIES Awards - Poetry Gold Medal Winner

    “Prophetic in bleak times”
    —DR. CORNEL WEST

    The Willies, Adam Falkner's first full-length poetry collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. In a voice that Dr. Cornel West heralds as “prophetic in bleak times,” Falkner departs from a more familiar coming out narrative to center the stories of dueling selves. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete.

    Drifting seamlessly between the scholarly and conversational, Falkner's poems showcase a versatility of language and a courageous hunger, unafraid of depicting the costumes we use to hide legacies of toxic masculinity. Through snapshots both tragic and humorous, merciless and humane, Falkner offers powerful new ways of understanding the intersectional linkage that binds queer shame to cultural appropriation. At its core, The Willies asks us to consider who we will become if we do not grapple with what scares us most.


    Advance praise for The Willies

    Adam Falkner has heard what hums at the marrow of men who deceive themselves in order to survive America.
    — SAEED JONES

    This is truth that changes the air it reaches. This is poetry that, damn it, you can't shake.
    — PATRICIA SMITH

    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

    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

    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
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherButton Poetry
    Release dateFeb 4, 2020
    ISBN9781943735761
    The Willies
    Author

    Adam Falkner

    Dr. Adam Falkner is a poet, educator and arts & culture strategist. He is the author of Adoption (Winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award) and The Willies (forthcoming from Button Poetry, 2020), and his work has appeared in a range of print and media spaces including on programming for HBO, NBC, NPR, BET, 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 Special Projects Director for Urban Word NYC, in

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      Book preview

      The Willies - Adam Falkner

      father

      THE WILLIES

      I.

      Willie Boy

      Let’s Get One Thing Halfway Straight

      Connor Everywhere But

      Intake

      My Father Is a Mansion

      The Year the Wu-Tang Drops

      A Tale of Two Cities

      Thanksgiving

      Flight 2331

      My Grandma Calls Me Barack

      Fishing the Little Pigeon

      Intake

      The Year The Blueprint Drops

      Kissing Your Shoulder Blade Is the Most Honest Thing I’ve Done This Week

      L Train Rumor

      The Whitest Thing

      Men’s Ten-Meter, London Olympics

      II.

      Straight

      Look At Me Now

      His Name Was Eduardo

      Ronnie’s Father Was the First Real Drunk I Knew

      Intake

      Cool

      Sleeping Beside My Mother

      If You Don’t Know

      Intake

      Definition of Privilege

      It’s Tricky So Stay With Me

      By the Time The Chronic Drops Again

      Intake

      III.

      Adoption

      Intake

      Joey From Dawson’s Creek Was My Beard

      As Long As You’re Out

      Holden’s Poem

      The Abandoned

      Preparing the House

      Gospel

      Intake

      Poem for the Lovers at Pickerel Lake

      Get Well Soon from Riverside Church

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Mad lives is up for grabs.

      —Ghostface Killah

      * * *

      Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

      —Adrienne Rich

      I.

      Willie Boy

      Finally, the poem I will not write.

      I am in fifth grade, wrestling

      in a brush pile of dead leaves

      with a now-dead friend. We paw

      the hardening knots in each other’s

      gym shorts, laugh and writhe until

      the leaf pile is no longer a pile

      but a kicked-in hive of tiny heaving

      lungs; soft stink of new sweat

      and rotting wood. Six girlfriends

      and a dissertation later, I wake up

      in a tougher city with new friends

      who remind me of my father.

      I look at men with chiseled

      jaws on loud trains in new ways,

      or rather, old ways but with less

      at stake. Wonder if they ever hover

      their gaze over me for an instant

      too long, too; if the flexed tricep

      peeking from under my own black

      t-shirt makes them dance their eyes

      into pretend reading material, too.

      I freeze snapshots of beautiful strangers,

      pin them in the high-ceilinged hallways

      inside me near the faces of everyone who

      knows me by a different town and

      a different version of my father,

      none of which are of the Christmas

      he got loaded and started yelling about

      how gay people give him the willies,

      rooted in Willie-boy, or sissy—

      a name I’ve tried fighting and drinking

      and fucking away since sixth grade.

      A badge I’ve tried burying amidst

      the brass edges of ball fields

      and rap songs. Still, from beneath

      the goose down of this new bearded

      man, soft snore into my shoulder’s

      right teacup, hairy thigh laid heavy

      across my lap, I peck the first lines

      of a poem I will not finish. Another

      Willie. Sissy. It raises its hand, draws

      a blank. Swells its chest, coughs soot.

      Curls its fists. Slinks into the night.

      Let’s Get One Thing Halfway Straight: I have spent my entire life trying on costumes because no one told me I couldn’t and the stakes were never that high which I’ve come to think is mostly what makes a white writer a white writer. The last time anyone referred to me by that name was exactly never but that’s also the point. I am a queer poet. Child of an addict. Masquerading white boy. My best friend died and

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