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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
My Favorite Tyrants
Winner:Midwest Book Award (MIPA) -Poetry (2015)
In this bitingly funny and often surprising memoir, award-winning author and groundbreaking comedian Bob Smith offers a meditation on the vitality of the natural world--and an intimate portrait of his own darkly humorous and profoundly authentic response to a life-changing illness.
In Treehab--named after a retreat cabin in rural Ontario--Smith muses how he has "always sought the path less traveled." He rebuffs his diagnosis of ALS as only an unflappable stand-up comic could ("Lou Gehrig's Disease? But I don't even like baseball ") and explores his complex, fulfilling experience of fatherhood, both before and after the onset of the disease.
Stories of his writing and performing life--punctuated by hilariously cutting jokes that comedians tell only to each other--are interspersed with tales of Smith's enduring relationship with nature: boyhood sojourns in the woods of upstate New York and adult explorations of the remote Alaskan wilderness; snakes and turtles, rocks and minerals; open sky and forest canopy; God and friendship--all recurring touchstones that inspire him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children.
Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at global warming, equal rights, sex, dogs, Thoreau, and more, Smith demonstrates here the inimitable insight that has made him a beloved voice of a generation. He reminds us that life is perplexing, beautiful, strange, and entirely worth celebrating.
In Treehab--named after a retreat cabin in rural Ontario--Smith muses how he has "always sought the path less traveled." He rebuffs his diagnosis of ALS as only an unflappable stand-up comic could ("Lou Gehrig's Disease? But I don't even like baseball ") and explores his complex, fulfilling experience of fatherhood, both before and after the onset of the disease.
Stories of his writing and performing life--punctuated by hilariously cutting jokes that comedians tell only to each other--are interspersed with tales of Smith's enduring relationship with nature: boyhood sojourns in the woods of upstate New York and adult explorations of the remote Alaskan wilderness; snakes and turtles, rocks and minerals; open sky and forest canopy; God and friendship--all recurring touchstones that inspire him to fight for his survival and for the future of his two children.
Aiming his potent, unflinching wit at global warming, equal rights, sex, dogs, Thoreau, and more, Smith demonstrates here the inimitable insight that has made him a beloved voice of a generation. He reminds us that life is perplexing, beautiful, strange, and entirely worth celebrating.
Book Details
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publish Date: Sep 27th, 2016
- Pages: 80
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.20in - 7.13in - 0.26in - 0.34lb
- EAN: 9780299297848
- Categories: • American - Hispanic & Latino
About the Author
Joanne Diaz is an assistant professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is the author of an earlier collection of poems, The Lessons, and her poetry has appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications. She is also a past recipient of writing fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Praise for this book
"Rich with smart, deft scenes--places you may not have been before, exactly, but feel strangely at home in. Congratulations to this transporting, potent, poet."--Naomi Shihab Nye, Brittingham Prize judge
"Forged of equal parts brains and brass, these poems bleed and shine and all but blind us. How wild they are, how beautiful! I love the way Joanne Diaz uses light and noise to tell us more than any history book can of the tyrants who distort yet give meaning to our lives: Castro, Stalin, our teachers, our parents, ourselves."--David Kirby
"Exquisitely attentive to the given world, to history, to the human heart, to the cadence of words: the poems in this volume share all the virtues of Joanne Diaz's earlier work. What is new is the freer discursive range and the sharpened abutments of tenderness and astringency. Elegy meets social satire in these pages, the TSA watch list meets an elegant Persian poetic form. In the world these poems refuse to disown, sorrow smells like Lysol in the toilet stalls and bounty is undaunted by formica: it's a joy to see how largeness of spirit and clear-eyed penetration can sustain one another. Her favorite tyrants? Above all, the dictates of memory and love."--Linda Gregerson
"[Diaz's] poems are nakedly aware of political realities while possessed of an urgent grace."--Library Journal