Daddy Issues
There are oil slicks in a patrilineal line — spaces in which paternal securities and filial affections lurch and loosen. So how does a daddy make do? In Alex McElroy’s collection "Daddy Issues," daddies mourn their children; daddies absent themselves from their children; daddies take the shapes of celebrities to steal away the disguised wives of their children. Sometimes, daddies burn in a barn. Through an accumulation of gears, string and brute pectoral muscle, McElroy brings these daddies back to life that we may see them as they are, in all their splendor and flop.
Bio
Alex McElroy earned a Master in Fine Arts in creative writing from Arizona State University in 2015. His writing appears in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review and New England Review, and he is the recipient of the 2016 Neutrino Prize from Passages North.
Praise for this book
Vicious and haunting, luminescent and big-hearted, Alex McElroy’s writing burrows its way to the deep tissue of feeling and lodges there, determined. A gripping and nervy dissection of familial ties and the ambivalent bonds that structure our reality, 'Daddy Issues' will leave you undone.
Alexandra Kleeman Author of "You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine"
In 'Daddy Issues,' it seems Alex McElroy would have you believe that he’s most interested in the dysfunction inside families, in the weird and grotesque goings-on and the shameful secrets lurking in all our homes. Because what lives alongside them are our hopes, our dreams, our most genuine feelings, all mixed up in the often hapless muck of what it means to be a family.
Matt Bell Author of "Scrapper"
