Yes! Twenty-five copies of this smashing little book are now in my hot little hands, after several delays involving printers and, amazingly, the city of Newark, NJ. LOL don't ask.

And um ... what to say about it? Other than the usual, "You seriously need to buy one for every room in your house, and possibly two for each family member and friend."?

Well, there's this. I usually write poetry collections fast when I'm not distracted with other work, or with depression, which is like having a second full-time job, only one in a condemned building, with a passive-aggressive boss and co-workers who wander out for a smoke every 5 minutes. I wrote the bulk of The Memory Palace in three months, for example. Well, Fathers, Daughters, Ghosts, & Monsters took me roughly a year and is about 2/3 Memory Palace's size. So why was that? Well for one thing, it was the "second job" in the crummy neighborhood. It was also because these poems were just damn hard to write. Not only emotionally (as is anything involving fathers and daughters for me), but stylistically and technically, and creatively. They're probably some of the strongest and most competent I've ever written, and I am beyond proud to call them mine.


Here's what shadesong had to say in FDGM's first (and so far sole) review:

My new LJ subtitle is “freelance alchemist”. Vanderhooft could use that title herself. As she did in The Memory Palace, she uses poetry to transmute her complex relationship with her father; where her processing was stripped bare in The Memory Palace, it is here viewed through lenses of folktales and fables, science fiction and horror. The title “The Robot’s Daughter” made me laugh, but the story so artfully shaped within is one of the most poignant in the collection. “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” is breathtaking in ways that I’ve yet to fully articulate; like the daughter in this poem, Vanderhooft describes the darkness at the heart by tracing, suggesting; it’s a lovely and fitting use of negative space. There are quiet acts of desperation and revenge by bitter daughters, and love and longing by others. The standout for me is a matched set: “The Step-Father” and “The Step-Daughter”, a mirror, two people trying to find a way to relate to each other in a world that defines their relationship as one of opposition.

“The Vampire’s Daughter” is another note-perfect poem. I’ve never seen vampirism handled the way it is here, and it’s brilliant in a way that makes me wonder why I never saw things that way before. It’s in the form of an interview - a startling departure at first, but ideal for what Vanderhooft needs to accomplish here, and boy, does she pull it off. It’s the strongest piece in a book full of strong pieces, and it lingered in my mind for days afterward.

“Zeus’s Daughter” closes the collection, and it hits all the right notes, given that much of this has been Vanderhooft’s own exploration of herself as a daughter. It is bittersweet, wistful, and calm. The last words of the collection are those of closure: “It’s alright. It really is alright.”

Altogether, this collection is a wonderful examination of a relationship so rarely explored with this sort of delicacy and depth. I enjoyed Vanderhooft’s earlier work, but mining this territory has made her even better - each collection builds on the last, and I can’t wait til the next.

There is a lot of horror in these 25 poems, and a lot of pain, which shouldn't strike most of my readers as peculiar. At the risk of sounding like I should be Bartending. At a Goth club. In the dark.: Life is pretty painful and horrifying (and often downright horrible), and I try not to sidestep this truth in my work. So, yes, a lot of these poems on vampires, ghosts, robots, gods and monsters and their offspring are "dark," but they are just as often tender, loving, painful and even sweet. Writing these poems was a beautiful, exhausting and ultimately triumphant journey for me, and I think they will take you on a journey too, no matter your sex, your gender identity or whether or not you've ever had or been a daughter or a father. Marge Simon's illustrations are, as always, beautiful and perfectly matched to my poetry. It's an honor to work with her, and I don't know where I'd be without her great work.

Here's another preview for those of you who may not yet be convinced. One of the gentler ones.

The Grocer’s Daughter

Among the cabbages it happened,
among the rampion and broccoli,
the firm grapes dark as open eyes.
It happened like leaves landing in a ditch;
he looked, and she was there
lumped beneath the tomatoes’ blistered shadows,
her little fists hard as walnut shells,
mouth wide and screaming as a pomegranate
spilled onto a plate—
he saw and feared as one.

Like any man, like any proper grocer,
he knew the seasons like his sleeps,
and the garden like his enemy.
But not this, no not such things as mushroom girls
sprouting from sweet compost –
the blush of female flesh was strange to him;
his trade lay in scales and cold cucumber skins.
Yet, he knew as any grocer knows
the cruelty of leaving cherries
for blackbirds and spiders.
So cursing his luck like a blighted crop
he pulled her from the soil and swore to tend her
like his persimmons – with one eye for spoilage,
another for the market.

A girl, even one found growing in a garden, he soon learned
needs but a bit at first – sunlight,
some air but more of protective shade,
the better to spore in the rich nitrates he apportioned daily.
But gradually as spring, her frail mouth
burst with words; want, need, now
and, the strangest, papa,
each flowering inside his tick veins
new fruits he cannot prune, package or sell
or even classify.
It seems as though, he muses, all his stock
had tumbled into him and left him full
as any burgher after breakfast.
The mushroom baby – almost a girl now –
laughs in the bedroom, having grown too big for her patch of earth.
His breath catches, and he wonders
when it was that she became a daughter.

He does not remember when the budding started,
if it was in the garden weeding the sharp onion bed,
or in the grocery, spray beading on the aubergines,
the bright coin changing hands like prayers.
Still, it does not really matter, he supposes,
because his mushroom fingers still have strength
and his mushroom skin is not so strange it scares the goodwives.
If anything, his new closeness to the soil
has taught him the kind of husbandry
his ex-wife never saw,
and a kind of gentle parentage.

Now she bounces in his mycelial arms
her impossible face turned upwards in a smile so wide
he feels his being swell like a cornucopia
and out spills strawberries and pineapples,
cabbages and grapes darker than earth.

If you want to get the book, it would normally cost you $20 through VanZeno Press' Web site. But if you buy it from me, I'll sell it to you for $17.00, including shipping, and also scribble my name in it. Comment here, or email me at upstart (dot!) crow (at!) gmail (dot!) com (which is also my Paypal address).

So, yeah. That's about it. Longest book announcement post evar, Y/N?