Tell Me About Your Bad Guys: Fathering in Anxious Times - Couverture souple

Dowdy, Michael

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1496240502 ISBN 13 : 9781496240507

Editeur : University of Nebraska Press, 2025

Synopsis

Michael Dowdy perceives the world as a poet, one with an anxiety disorder. As a result he has rarely experienced fathering or his relationship with his daughter, A, as a linear narrative. Rather, his impressions of fathering coalesce in encounters with the conditions of our time, producing intense flashes of awareness and emotion. Critiquing his own fathering practices, Dowdy's essays move between simplicity--being present for his daughter--and complexity--considering the harrowing present of entrenched misogyny, school shootings, climate change, and other threats to childing and fathering with love, optimism, and joy.

The essays in Tell Me about Your Bad Guys do not provide easy answers. They follow instead an interrogative mode, guided by A's unruly questions and Dowdy's desire to avoid fatherhood literature's traps: false modesty, antic ineptitude, and defensive clowning. This means understanding fathering not as an ironclad identity or a cohesive story but as a process of trial and error, self-reflection, and radical openness. With measures of dark humor, the essays take seriously the literary, material, and political stakes of fathering and in doing so challenge patriarchal norms and one-dimensional accounts of fatherhood.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Michael Dowdy is a professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Urbilly: Poems and American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement, co-edited with Claudia Rankine.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Nebraska Press
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1496240502
• ISBN 13: 9781496240507
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 218
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible