Sundress Reads: Review of Daddio: An Iterative Erasure

MP Vare’s debut poetry chapbook, Daddio: An Iterative Erasure, was released from Bottlecap Press in 2025. Primarily a visual artist, MP Vare uses erasure, itself a type of visual poetry, and vast spans of negative space to display the effects of parental estrangement and pseudohostility. The source text is a bizarre letter addressed to the author by their father. This chapbook distills its source into uncomfortable, unspoken truths about neglect, absence, and legacy while holding the tension of a relationship that may never reach repair.

Throughout the text, child takes on ownership of the source material and the persona of the father to reclaim the role of “speaker.” The child figure is searching for the essentials of identity without the support of a stable parent, whose emotional needs swallow up all the air in a room. One poem immediately establishes an atmosphere of childlike self-soothing and self-discovery using the repetition of the lyric “I” and strings of affirmations: “I am / I like / I need / I can / I get” (Vare 16-17).Another comically reasserts the father’s ego with its own version of the self: “I / I and / I / and / so on… PS / I,” ultimately leaving “love you” unsaid (2-3). In perhaps the driest example of neglect, the poem “Corporeal” consists only of the word “Hey,” a passive greeting that represents the bare minimum of parental presence (18). The father-speaker justifies his tokenism with the aggrandizing conceit of “Walmart / more and more like / Notre Dame” followed by the resignation of “at least we have something” (14-15).

The ambiguity of child-speaker and father-speaker is perhaps the most compelling element of the chapbook, an unwarranted empathy and blurring of identity across generations. Which family member is left “wondering / still” only to realize “God / I’m invisible / look / they can’t see me. / This / continues / in spite of / me” (11, 25)? Which person feels “too weak / to be / me” (36)? Which one has “learned / to collect / debts,” and who is indebted to whom (5)? There is no right or wrong answer, as these are inherited sentiments. Just like the original letter, shame and loneliness are gifted from parent to child, a misguided attempt at alignment and understanding that result in comical conclusions such as “all of us nuts” (23). The disorder–both diagnostic and cosmic–that child-speaker and father-speaker share both unites and separates them, the very tension that binds these poems together.

However, child-speaker is grappling with more than what has been passed down. As the author explains in their author’s note, the medium of erasure not only represents their experience of sharing a bipolar 2 diagnosis with their father, but also the radiance of “what remains” despite the marginalization of trans* and chronically ill bodies (42). In other words, “Erasure encapsulates our estrangement” (42). The fragments of family found in these pages are physically disparate and scattered in space, but they make their own version of grammatical and semantic, even synaptic, sense, connected not only across but by the distance between them. Phrases like “they / even more / them” convey a sense of alienation and ostracization, but also gender euphoria and reinforced identity (39). Frugality and wonder flourish symbiotically when we are advised to “watch for / acorns / to become / homes” (20-21). Child-speaker still manages to extract wisdom and meaning from father-speaker’s disorganized legacy. Sardonic comments like “nice / antics… bail / love” could be an accusation of bailing on love, or an advisement to bail love out (28). By choosing to engage with the source text, the child-speaker gains valuable perspective, reflecting, “I was / away / from / me” and even declaring, “I own / my senses” (40, 29).

Whether the process of transmuting the letter into a poetry chapbook results in reconciliation is unclear. Now the reader is the one left “wondering / still” (11). The final poem, titled “In an Alternate Universe,” consists simply of a hypothetical harmony, brimming with longing: “I can call you / Daddy / still” (41). Even the unbroken insistence of reliability in “I can call you” feels somehow subjunctive. However, poetry and visual art alike rarely dabble in definitive resolutions, and if nothing else changed, both author and reader are transformed. The power of creating and engaging with art is in knowing, in the author’s terms, that “I’ll move through the world differently now, knowing I can do that” (42).

Daddio: An Iterative Erasure is available for purchase from Bottlecap Press

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Zoe Korte is a queer and mad poet whose work has appeared in Roi Fainéant, Maudlin House, new words {press}, Foglifter, Room Magazine, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. They have earned degrees in English, Spanish, and Ancient Greek from the University of Missouri. They live with their partner in St. Louis, where they work for Sundress Publications and the Missouri History Museum. You can find them on Instagram @zoekpoetry or Bluesky @mostlymosspoetry.