Dead Dad Jokes (Button Poetry)

Reviews

Erika Janet

Ive had this book on preorder for a while! The experiences they talk about in regards to having to care for their father, and losing pieces of themselves and not being to implement activities that the author wanted to do was extremely moving and heart-breaking to read. Though the main themes of this book are queerness and grief, the trauma and writing are spun on its head because the bond between Ollie and their father was never particularly strong or even healthy and accepting.

Flamingo

This is a book of poetry that can only be described as TRULY UNFLINCHING. It’s kinda angry and tearful but I really enjoyed the experience of a good poem feeling like I was being bruised.

Hannah

As many of you may know, I’m not the biggest fan of poetry because I never feel moved by or taken with them – there’s no connection or power between the words and me. Dead Dad Jokes by Ollie Schminkey is a Button Poetry published collection dealing with the death of her father from a terminal illness.

Additionally, there was this constant comparison throughout of human death and animal death, with a lot of hunting analogy, referenced in the book cover. It’s a moment of grief where you can’t explain the pain and you just describe everything in 1000 seconds, this book is like that.

It took a mans grief and revealed all of it as it is, like the rambles of a drunk man from a sober mouth; each poem is real, scarring, relatable. So happy it arrived unexpectedly this morning, I've already read through it once with many tears!

I will say it’s a poetry book I’d only be able to go back to after having quite a distance from it, I think that there’s a really intense heaviness in these pages that’s fantastic but hard to carry without breaks in between! Its been good to read something so relatable after loosing my own farther only two months ago.