Nimrods

Description

In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Charged with the “personal is political” mandate of feminist critique, Guillermo honestly and powerfully recounts his wayward path, from being raised by two preachers’ kids in a chaotic mixed-race family, to his uncle’s death from HIV-related illness that helped prompt his parents' divorce and his mother’s move to Las Vegas, to his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms by immigrating to South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Canada. Through an often crass, cringey, and raw hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects on anger, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation—traits that do not simply vanish after being cast into the treacherous role of fatherhood or the dreaded role of professor. Guillermo’s shameless mixtures of autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad Dad jokes present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk, self-hurt, anti-memoir. In this edgy and unconventional memoir, Kawika Guillermo reflects on being a newly minted professor, fatherhood, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation as well as his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms. Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: an anti-travel novel and All Flowers Bloom. Kawika Guillermo is the pseudonym for Christopher B. Patterson, who is Associate Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and the author of Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games and Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature of the Transpacific. In Vocation  1
Strophe: Ode to Patriarchy
Nice Guys Read This Last  5
OMG I'm Turning White Like My Dad  25
Repugnant  35
Scat  45
Doing Tim  55
Dead Ends  65
I Hope You  85
Antistrophe: Holy Hai Bun
Suicide's Last Call  89
The Last Ride  100
Binge  114
All Our Yellow Fevers  126
A Psalm of My Mother, Who, After Five Years Divorced, Returns to Portland  141
To Hell and Back to Hell Again  148
Long Gone Daddy  161
Epode: Three / Cord Digression
Sissy / Sister Cis  181
Re / Con Sile  193
Me / More Ire  205
Envoi  219
Bibliography  225

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