Cloth: 978-1-957946-55-9 | Paper: 978-1-957946-56-6 | eISBN: 978-1-957946-54-2 (OA)
If the list, as Umberto Eco once claimed, is the basis of culture, then the poems in this collection are a soil sample of all the rotted fauna and toxic waste that make up the loam contemporary white fatherhood plants its monoculture in—girldad fighterjets, midwestern vanity license plates, Clark Griswold prodding a caged ape, Fabio bleeding in the bathroom as reckless gender reveals incinerate a blasted landscape. In a world that is more poison than paradise, that is as much microplastic as it is polycrisis, a world that has been hacked into nations and stitched back together by oily supply chains and fuzzy diasporic memory, these poems wonder what a father is, can be, and should teach to their offspring when all they’ve been taught has been how to blend into a country intent on transforming difference and dissent into knickknacks. Knuckled like a crayfish and sieving the trash-clogged streams of our era, Conor Bracken’s poetry is bent—in self-defense? in prayer? supplication?—on bringing the contradictions of creating life in a necrophagous era into the kind of tension necessary to strike a chord or fire an arrow.
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