The Willies is a book that finds its author grappling with the intersections of race, gender, and a family trying to stay close, despite the failing health of its patriarch. These poems are honest, vulnerable, and unflinching in their ability to look into the speaker's complications. The poems trace the author's childhood, adulthood, and hopeful future, all of them asking the central question of how a person continues to love themselves, even as all they know evolves and vanishes.