Sundress Publications announces the release of Amorak Huey’s Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. The fourth collection from award-winning poet Amorak Huey is an unflinching, humorous meditation on American masculinity and fatherhood.
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.
Oliver de la Paz, author of The Boy in the Labyrinth, said of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy, “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.”
Order your copy of Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy today!
Amorak Huey is the author of two chapbooks and three previous full-length books of poetry. His poems appear in The Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Columbia Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. A 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives in East Grand Rapids, Michigan with his wife, two children, and pets.
