Coming soon: September 30, 2026! Director’s grant recipient & COURAGE to WRITE Writer of Note Conor Bracken’s poetry collection, All-American Dad,will be published by Bridwell Press! This is especially exciting, as this is the project for which Conor was awarded both grants!
A mixed-race, white-passing father tries to model fatherhood for his children in a neoimperial hellscape.
If the list, as Umberto Eco once claimed, is the basis of culture, then the poems in this collection are a soil sample of all the rotted fauna and toxic waste that make up the loam contemporary white fatherhood plants its monoculture in—girldad fighterjets, midwestern vanity license plates, Clark Griswold prodding a caged ape, Fabio bleeding in the bathroom as reckless gender reveals incinerate a blasted landscape. In a world that is more poison than paradise, that is as much microplastic as it is polycrisis, a world that has been hacked into nations and stitched back together by oily supply chains and fuzzy diasporic memory, these poems wonder what a father is, can be, and should teach to their offspring when all they’ve been taught has been how to blend into a country intent on transforming difference and dissent into knickknacks. Knuckled like a crayfish and sieving the trash-clogged streams of our era, Conor Bracken’s poetry is bent—in self-defense? in prayer? supplication?—on bringing the contradictions of creating life in a necrophagous era into the kind of tension necessary to strike a chord or fire an arrow.
Learn more and pre-order your copy
Visit Conor’s website, www.conorbracken.com