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barbaralunardi 's review for:
Dead Dad Jokes
by Ollie Schminkey
For me poetry is about entering the author's feelings, and in my personal opinion the best ones are the ones you just can't touch: when you read and you go places, like their words are waves that rubs your whole body. This particular collection of poetry, however, started okay for me, and then it just made me feel completely out of place, much more like it wasn't right for me to be reading it.
I know how hard it must be to lose your dad, and especially how sad it is to the person who took care of you be in such a bad condition. I've seen my dad take care of his ill dad, and I'm seeing my mother taking care of her mother, and how difficult it is for them too to understand they need to be taken care of. So I get the author's necessity to explore the feelings that grows with the process.
At first didn't understand he was alcoholic, it was after a few chapters in that I understood how complex the author's feelings about his absence and disorder were, and his death. Because of that I think the story would work much better as a narrative than a poetry/narrative: it felt impersonal and I couldn't connect with the text, like it was missing parts for me, as a reader, to truly be attached to what I was reading.
As someone here said, I too felt like I was invading this man's space, with lots of quotes that just rubbed me the wrong way; I think some of them should just have stayed in the author's head, because I, as a reader, didn't need that much information? Like these ones, for example:
"i still
remember the feeling of my father's corpse, his
soft hands growing stiff.
ha ha. growing stiff.
like a dick, right?"
or
"everyone tells me that my dad will
always be watching over me
and i'm like
—shut up, i'm just trying to masturbate—"
or
"after all of that, the first thing i said was
—i love you dad, but couldn't you have died
the day BEFORE i had to touch your dick?—"
and another quote I literally didn't understand was:
"i knew i would be okay because i have always
been, i guess. even when rape was the gospel
preaching inside my body"
Anyway, I really don't think this collection was for me, as I personally feels like it was written like Tumblr posts, with too much details that made me uncomfortable, and the writing would be better explored if the text wasn't in this poetry style. But I appreciate the opportunity to read, and a big thanks to NetGalley for providing me with this book*
I know how hard it must be to lose your dad, and especially how sad it is to the person who took care of you be in such a bad condition. I've seen my dad take care of his ill dad, and I'm seeing my mother taking care of her mother, and how difficult it is for them too to understand they need to be taken care of. So I get the author's necessity to explore the feelings that grows with the process.
At first didn't understand he was alcoholic, it was after a few chapters in that I understood how complex the author's feelings about his absence and disorder were, and his death. Because of that I think the story would work much better as a narrative than a poetry/narrative: it felt impersonal and I couldn't connect with the text, like it was missing parts for me, as a reader, to truly be attached to what I was reading.
As someone here said, I too felt like I was invading this man's space, with lots of quotes that just rubbed me the wrong way; I think some of them should just have stayed in the author's head, because I, as a reader, didn't need that much information? Like these ones, for example:
"i still
remember the feeling of my father's corpse, his
soft hands growing stiff.
ha ha. growing stiff.
like a dick, right?"
or
"everyone tells me that my dad will
always be watching over me
and i'm like
—shut up, i'm just trying to masturbate—"
or
"after all of that, the first thing i said was
—i love you dad, but couldn't you have died
the day BEFORE i had to touch your dick?—"
and another quote I literally didn't understand was:
"i knew i would be okay because i have always
been, i guess. even when rape was the gospel
preaching inside my body"
Anyway, I really don't think this collection was for me, as I personally feels like it was written like Tumblr posts, with too much details that made me uncomfortable, and the writing would be better explored if the text wasn't in this poetry style. But I appreciate the opportunity to read, and a big thanks to NetGalley for providing me with this book*