The Willies

$18.00

Adam Falkner, 2020.

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adam_falkner
05/14/22
Feels like a lifetime — but it’s hard to believe the journey with this baby has only been two years. 🌱 Feeling grateful for the small notes & big love still coming from so many of y’all — & the new doorways & new poems & new friendships made through these pages. 🌱 Stretching toward lots of new work right now & feeling alive with possibility. Send it your way, too. 🌱
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curiositybcn
01/16/22
Just received a beautiful bundle of poetry! I found the publisher buttonpoetry through 'Depression and Other Magic Tricks' (badass_sab), which discovered me alongside 'Hold your Own' (Kaetempest) in waterstones a few years ago, and made me late for the hairdressers! It was a moment so captivating I wrote a poem about it titled ‘Submission’, published by the prostibulopoetico in the #librorojo. I adore what Button do - accessible and gorgeous performance poetry by diverse poets in beautiful bindings. **************** *Submission* It began: caterpillar trails on moleskin yielding to the slap of keys, fevers of printer ink. It began: with you wrapped in brown paper, bound with metal clips, passed palm to palm until the right pair of eyes tore you open spilling blistered velvet, crackling dust, chocolate salt. It began: and since that moment in the bookshop café after a Japanese hipster left you naked on the table and my curiosity held your spine and made me late for the hairdressers; it is I whose eyes dilate as they stroke your form, who watches breath arrested as your black moths settle on my conscience, whose blood thrusts with your metre, who kneels at your stanza and begs for line breaks that smack my thighs. It began: with larvae begging for blood and breath and the beating of creation. **************** #readingpoetryinbed #paperbackpoetrylover #readpoetryplease #poetryrebellion #neveralonewithapoem #darlingsandlovelies #performancepoetry #spokenword #poetrybrothel #poetrycommunity #invisiblerevolution #buttonpoetry #sabrinabenaim #kaetempest #waterstones
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adam_falkner
03/16/21
What are the stories you don’t tell to keep yourself safe? Who (else) are you hurting until you do? 🌱 “The Willies” was announced this week as a finalist for the Foreword Indies’ 2020 Book of the Year. Grateful for this little nod — and for every other small signal boost & reach out & note of encouragement along the way. 🌱 @buttonpoetry #thewillies #forewordreviews #forewardindies #poetsofinstagram #buttonpoetry
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adam_falkner
02/19/21
Hard to believe this little baddie turned 1 year old this week! 🧁 What a gift it has been / continues to be to give a thing of such wild life in a year of such grief. When I think of how many times this book & the telling of these poems has returned me to myself this year — and moreso, deeper into communion with so many of you — my body literally vibrates with gratitude. Vibrates. 🧁 This was on my stoop in Brooklyn last March, tired out after a few readings in Chicago & Miami & a freshly cancelled AWP, just as the weirdness was settling in. I said then that I’d sign & send discounted copies to folks for the chaos of the cancelled engagements — & wouldn’t you know it, @buttonpoetry is offering the same to mark the moment. Hop over there & cop if you haven’t & please-oh-please drop me a message when you do. 🧁 #buttonpoetry #adamfalkner #thewillies
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adam_falkner
02/19/21
Hard to believe this little baddie turned 1 year old this week! 🧁 What a gift it has been / continues to be to give a thing of such wild life in a year of such grief. When I think of how many times this book & the telling of these poems has returned me to myself this year — and moreso, deeper into communion with so many of you — my body literally vibrates with gratitude. Vibrates. 🧁 This was on my stoop in Brooklyn last March, tired out after a few readings in Chicago & Miami & a freshly cancelled AWP, just as the weirdness was settling in. I said then that I’d sign & send discounted copies to folks for the chaos of the cancelled engagements — & wouldn’t you know it, @buttonpoetry is offering the same to mark the moment. Hop over there & cop if you haven’t & please-oh-please drop me a message when you do. 🧁 #buttonpoetry #adamfalkner #thewillies
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simonmaddrell
02/05/20
buttonpoetry adam_falkner great queer poetry book debut
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simonmaddrell
02/05/20
buttonpoetry adam_falkner great queer poetry book debut
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simonmaddrell
02/05/20
buttonpoetry adam_falkner great queer poetry book debut
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carolinerothstein
02/04/20
Happy pub day, adam_falkner!!! People: hurry up & get this book via buttonpoetry and/or your local bookstore. I read it in a day. I couldn’t put it down. Congrats, my friend. Sixteen years and counting you’ve been blowing me away. Love love love. Xo
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mymediatedlife
01/30/20
Got my signed pre-ordered copy today! adam_falkner’s way with words—the humor and emotion and sadness and excitement and realness—are something to behold. As Cornel West says about him, his voice is needed in these challenging times. Order this book today! #thewillies buttonpoetry
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Description

The Willies, Falkner’s first full-length poetry collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. Departing from a more familiar coming out narrative he centers 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.

Awards

Praise for The Willies

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

About 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… MORE

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