Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy by Amorak Huey

I cannot believe this book has been on my shelf for three years and I’m just reading it. I should have read it several times by now. I should be using these poems in my class! What a fun book! True to its title, there’s humor in these poems, but humor in the service of humanity. The poems are filled with human yearning, loss, urgency. And also with imagination and play. They are like the most interesting conversation you had with a stranger at a party. A conversation that makes you want to figure out how to become besties with this person, if only you could remember their name through the haze of the evening. It’s Amorak. Buy here.

From “The Seventh Anniversary Is Salt & I Do Not Know the Gift for That”

I have little to offer. I am not good with my hands.

Here, take these words I did not invent

& cannot sing but have used

in this particular order

for what may or may not be the first time.

I am not the strong silent type, being

neither strong nor silent. Which is good,

because look how many Marlboro Men

died of lung cancer or emphysema . . .

“Elegy for Dr. Spock”

My parents grew up wanting to be told they were loved. I wanted air conditioning & a store-bought haircut. I guess everyone’s childhood is fucked. The current president is president of all of us because his father was an approval-withholding asshole. The previous president’s father abandoned him early. The president before that was the son of a goddamn president—how unfair is that to everyone involved? The president before that, another absent father. What the hell do we do to our sons? For years, American parents were told not to hug their boy children after they turned five. I like to think I’ve already eighty-sixed my son’s chances of ruling the free world someday, but the moral arc of the patriarchy is long & bends toward most of the damage has already been done.