In this collection of poems, my concern is with patriarchy and story telling, specifically of stories passed from father to son, and the failure of hyper masculinity (cyclical violence, impotence, addiction, &c). The book is comprised of three narrative modes: the mythic or allegorical, the historical, and the confessional. The subject matter moves from the grit of contemporary bar life, to magical allegories of loves failed, to the dramatic monologues of a late 1800s hangman and his son, to bucolic scenery inhabited by an archetypal patriarch and his boys. Each type of poem flexes varying formal elements - the prose poem, sonnet variations and free verse - and the poems juxtapose the beauty of form and white space with their often ribald, coarse language. I wish to create beauty from deterioration and I imagine the project as if Whitman's celebration were to be confronted with Eliot's bleak Wasteland. Each shattered voice sings in chorus and creates a singular persona whose primary want is to both celebrate and damn the dead.