Chris Vola reviews
Our Fatherlessness: Poems
by Mac Gay

The title of Mac Gay’s latest book speaks to a specific kind of loss. But death’s myriad forms lurk in nearly every terse line of Our Fatherlessness, forming the haunting backbone of a collection that is at once brilliantly bleak, darkly funny, and strangely enchanting. In 51 short, power-packed confessions, The Georgia-based poet recounts an innocently rural, mid-twentieth-century childhood shattered and reformed by a viciously random tragedy and its decades-long fallout, a vivid but often brutal headspace where “the world seems a garden / on top of a grave. / But the green tune plays on.” Yet despite the ubiquity of “death’s odds-on nothingness,” Gay infuses his verses with the wit and black humor of one who has spent too much time staring into the void but has chosen to laugh rather than succumb to the darkness. That levity, coupled with Gay’s highly musical, whimsical, and folksy style, serves as a powerful counterpoint to the book’s undeniably heavy themes that permeate every moment, from little league dustups, car racing calamities, and references to Black Sabbath and Sandy Koufax, to the terrible vestiges of Jim Crow cruelty that still linger deeply – “the whole sad history of the South / again sifted down upon me in the dark / like a violently shook paperweight’s snow.” Even those less personally acquainted with suffering will find more than a few nuggets of truth and wisdom here. Because, whether we care to admit it or not, we are all in some way “hankering for ghosts.” 

Mac Gay is the author of four poetry collections, including Farm Alarm, runner-up for the 2018 Robert Phillips Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press and Ghost Hunt, runner-up for Eyewear Publishing’s 2017 Beverly Prize. He teaches at Perimeter College of Georgia State University and lives in Covington, Georgia.

Chris Vola is the author of six books, including I is for Illuminati: An A-Z Guide to Our Paranoid Times (William Morrow, 2020). His reviews, poems, and short fictions appear in places like The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, PANK, The Main Street Rag, and Rain Taxi. He lives in Manhattan.