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How to Drown a Boy, a debut collection of poems by J. Bruce Fuller investigates how boyhood and fatherhood entwine to create cycles that mimic decaying and dangerous natural surroundings. The woods, the water, the oil rigs, and the men who work them all have a powerful effect on the speaker from childhood through adulthood. These poems examine the weight of family and culture against a backdrop of climate change and environmental disaster.
Praise for How to Drown a Boy
“J. Bruce Fuller’s How to Drown a Boy is both a chronicle of hard living in the Louisiana of the poet’s youth and a love song to the place he calls home. Read these poems to learn about fathers and sons, and about families making their way on the ragged edge of twenty-first-century America.” ~Patrick Phillips
“Conceived by a desert exile imagination and constructed in contemporary psalmic linguistics, these are poems of every faith, every belief, and beyond. Fuller has given us what we are rarely capable of seeing: a glimpse into the terrifying beauty of being human.” ~Darrell Bourque
“It’s so rare I find a book of poetry capable of taking me back home that I hardly know how to react whenever I do. Every page of How to Drown a Boy does just that, like the sound of family coming in through the screen door or the feel of a cool breeze on my neck.” ~Jack B. Bedell
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