How to Drown a Boy - by J Bruce Fuller (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 a decaying and dangerous natural environment. 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 natural disaster. Expectation, tradition, poverty, violence, and toxic masculinity all combine to shape the speaker, who must reconcile these forces in adulthood. Fuller's searing poems explore the pressures inherited from birth and how they shape a life, set amid the backyards, backwoods, and bayous of Louisiana. Ultimately, How to Drown a Boy is a book of understanding and forgiveness. For the land, and the labor. For the father, and for the boy who must become him. For what is passed down to us, and what we pass on"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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

About the Author

J. Bruce Fuller's poems have appeared in the Southern Review and Best New Poets 2022, among other publications. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Stanford University, where he served as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He teaches at Sam Houston State University and is the director of Texas Review Press.