Fatherless Children by Michael D. Grover, Roadside Press
Michael D. Grover’s Fatherless Children reads like a long, ragged hymn to absence — to fathers who didn’t teach, to a country that promises and extracts, to poetry itself as both refuge and condemnation. Structured as numbered vignettes rather than conventional poems, the chapbook forms a single sprawling elegy, part confessional, part manifesto, part late-night jazz solo. It’s messy in all the best ways, and its power comes from that rawness.
Grover’s voice is the book’s most compelling instrument: equal parts punk-radio howl and weathered confessional. Refrains like “We the fatherless children of America” echo like incantations, turning solitary grief into a collective anthem. This thematic unity gives the book its moral axis — personal abandonment expands into national critique, and private wounds become cultural diagnosis. Buddhist allusions, jazz riffs, and punk anger layer onto this lament without ever losing sight of its core. The soundscape is striking, too: short jolts, rolling lists, and breathy pauses create a kind of “cosmic jazz” that suits the improvisatory feel. Domestic images — sunsets, dogs, backyard jazz under an avocado tree — keep the poems grounded even as they stretch toward the metaphysical.
What makes the chapbook resonate most deeply is its blunt honesty. Grover favors directness over polish, and that unvarnished candor — by turns angry, weary, or wry — carries emotional credibility. A line such as “The only advice my father ever gave me as a writer / Don’t give it all away for free” lands like a devastating punchline, a small shard of biography that glitters with ache.
The memorable passages linger: the juxtaposition of Smokey Mountain gunfire with meditations on Buddhist suffering, the conjuring of words as a survival rite, the reckonings with cancer, funerals, and the silence of a phone call that never comes. In these moments, Grover makes absence not only visible but palpable, mapping how it threads through both the private and the public spheres.
Fatherless Children will appeal to readers who embrace Beat-adjacent, punk-inflected confessional poetry — those drawn to Kerouac’s improvisatory urgency, Ginsberg’s moral heat, or contemporary voices that value pulse over polish. It is less a book for those seeking lyric restraint or formal precision, and more for readers willing to follow an improvisation wherever it leads.
Ultimately, the chapbook feels like an honest conversation shouted across a backyard at sunset — sometimes graceless, often aching, but deeply humane. It does not solve the wound it examines, but it keeps company with it, a raw and necessary testament to the ways absence shapes both a life and a country.
Fatherless Children by Michael D. Grover is available wherever books are sold or https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/fatherless/TELWWXRQQ32HKMOJ53N3ZRBJ
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
