Current MFA Student Emily Updegraff Shares a Book Recommendation for National Poetry Month: "Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy" by Amorak Huey

I came across Amorak Huey’s 2021 poetry collection Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy while searching for books by Midwestern authors to write about at Great Lakes Review. The title had me at hello, and Dad Jokes is one of those rare books of poetry where every poem landed for me. Part prose poetry, part free verse, this collection reads like a comic autobiography loaded with social commentary, coalescing around themes like relationships between parents and children, desire, divorce, and disappointment. Dad jokes are lame, and I don’t quite believe the patriarchy is ending, but Huey’s poems have an honesty about them that propelled me to keep reading.

For example, here are a few lines from “Elegy for What I Want to Be When I Grow Up”:

I learned to bat left-handed,
Thinking it would mean something
eventually. Wrong, of course.
I will never have that kind of control
over my body. That call

When I read poetry, I try to slow down and read one line at a time, asking whether the line might mean something different if it were plucked out and hung on a wall by itself. I found Huey’s poetry to be rich in that way. Taking the lines above one by one, who hasn’t fiddled with some part of their personhood, thinking it might mean something? Who hasn’t had days when they feel like they’re wrong about everything? Who hasn’t longed for control? Whose body hasn’t upset them, overriding the delusion of control? The poems in Dad Jokes are clever and crisp on a first reading, and they get better and more insightful when re-read.

Here are another few lines from “Elegy for What I Want to Be When I Grow Up”:

Blame the unhappy childhood
I did not have for my lack
of hunger. Enough
to keep me alive, no more.

In telling us he’s never been hungry, the speaker tells us how hungry for something he actually is—writing poetry is a seeker’s art, after all. Other poems in the collection reveal that hunger in specific ways. With “Elegy” in the title, readers know that some part of the speaker is dead, but the book in our hands belies the idea that life is over. By middle age some doors have closed for everyone, but others have opened and there’s a lot going on inside those rooms. Huey’s poems explore them in funny, wrenching, and memorable ways.