Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, Amorak Huey
Drawing on fictional characters, cultural figures, and personal stories, Huey deftly weaves an intergenerational tale about coming of age as a boy in the twentieth century and becoming a father in the twenty-first. In a collection built around the narrative structure of a joke, the poems’ speakers reflect on the complex intersections of childhood, war, love, pop culture, and parenting. From Southwestern deserts to the flatlands of Indiana to the post-9/11 landscape of New York, Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy deconstructs the enduring notion of American patriarchy and explores the delineations between collective and individual memory. Playful and profound, nostalgic but not naïve, these poems trace a masterful journey of personal discovery and fatherly love.
“What is wise and funny and tells you the truth? An Amorak Huey poem. This is his best book yet.”
—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
“Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy is about more, of course, than dads, more than fathers and sons, though these poems are wonderfully full of them; it’s a deprogramming manual, dissecting and dismantling all the rusty tropes and tales of what it means to be a man or a boy in this modern world.”
—Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You
“Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy brings us all the dads: the pop culture papas, the hapless cartoon patriarchs, and the fathers of memory. Roiling with literal dad jokes and the humiliations played out on all of us, Amorak Huey’s poems roast memories like barbecue until a new vision of what it is to be a man emerges. With firework honesty, Huey admits ‘I cannot believe / I’m more than halfway through with this life / & still molded out of ninth-grade humiliations,’ then turns the ideas of father and man around in his palm like gemstones not yet cleaned, until they begin to sparkle a little brighter.”
—Dustin Parsons, author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams
“Earnest, funny, and heartbreaking, the poems in Amorak Huey’s new collection explore that lonely office of fatherhood. Such work is forever searching for the appropriate formula—that clever negotiation between self-actualization and self-negation as one struggles to understand what it means to care for children in the current quotidian. The joke is that Huey knows we are raised by many voices, where the voice of these poems sings with a wisdom that is both burdened and joyful. The joke is that the answers are here, in this wonderful collection, ready to delight.”
—Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth
“A father’s body is a protean subject. In Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, Amorak Huey catches that body, making it a vibrant, knowable thing. Huey’s ambitious, brilliant poems draw a sweet but clear line between what we want and what we can hold. We may never fully apprehend a father’s body, Huey warns us, but through these incredible poems, we may reach ourselves.”
—Nicole Walker, author of Sustainability: A Love Story