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. 

Conor Bracken is a poet, translator, and educator. His chapbook, Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour, was selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the fifth annual Frost Place Chapbook Competition (Bull City Press, 2017), and his debut collection of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, winner the 2020 Diode Editions Book Prize, was published in 2021.