The Willies
By Adam Falkner
4.5/5
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About this ebook
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
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