Amorak Huey’s Dad Jokes From Late in the Patriarchy is an astonishing work of droll, self-deprecating, unclothed insights about masculinity. About dads and sons. About being a father. About leaving. About adolescence and middle age. About sex and marriage. And throughout, it is uniquely—because it is uttered in a male voice—about disclosure: baring the same frailties and anxieties that all humans face but that heterosexual men often prefer not to reveal. The underlying conjecture lies in these lines from “Poems Autocorrects to Porns”: "[…] we’re all tangled in the effort to give language / to our body’s cravings: the human condition, / in other words."

In “Looking at Men,” Huey spits out the terms of sexism that many men would deny:

Doesn’t matter
if a man’s wearing a three-piece that costs more
than your car or a neon vest or a prison jumpsuit,
he has a right to the space you occupy.

And the terms of being raised a male in the US:

I cannot believe
I’m more than halfway through with this life & still molded out of ninth-grade humiliation.
I do not dare admit weakness. I cannot
tell the truth about want. I am not
this body. I am not this sex. I am not
strong enough to be anything else.

In “FMK”—which we at first think might be someone’s initials, but later in the poem learn they are the initials for “Fuck Marry Kill”—Huey offers, "You can leave me & I will not kill you. / That this needs to be said is insane / but I am a man & this is the world. "

The writing is far from glib but shy of melancholy. Huey has done something remarkable here—unable to commit to any one-sided story, he uses pathos to paint a vivid picture of a man walking a tightrope from meaning on one rooftop to meaninglessness on another without stumbling. He does this with a huge “what if” imagination, and an unsettling memory of being a boy and then a young adult juxtaposed with living a middle-class life as a man who is a son, a husband, a father, a teacher, and a poet. And, I would add, a wistful existentialist: "my life has not stopped feeling / like practice for some life / that’s around the corner."

In “Nocturne with Overdue Books,” a couple is in bed, “One of us lies awake, the other sleeps,” and “our kids are still awake in rooms nearby.” We overhear the couple’s conversation,

I forgot to tell you, the library called again today.
We’re out of renewals. It’s not a metaphor.
I don’t know where the books are. Maybe
there’s one under the bed.

The poem concludes with: "If this does not sound like a love poem you’re reading it wrong."

In the sorrowful poem, “Dad Jokes,” on the meaning side of the equation, we learn, "At some point I came to understand / my job was to make the world / more bearable for my children." But this is immediately countered with, "It’s possible I was wrong & anyway / I don’t think I’m very good at it." The sentiment is further extended in “Half-life with Bumper Stickers,”

Coming soon: the death of everyone I’ve ever loved
plus my own, in no particular order.
In no sense have I come to terms with this.
I have already failed to hide
the mortality thing from my kids
though I suppose the inevitable is not my fault.

Given the title, you might ask, is Dad Jokes From Late in the Patriarchy a funny book? Why yes, it is. Just look at the poems’ titles, read between the lines, step into Huey’s shoes for a tiny moment—and I assure you, you’ll be ROFLMAO.