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, which 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 one is 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.
Kawika Guillermo is the author of Stamped: An Anti-travel Novel and All Flowers Bloom. Kawika Guillermo is the matrilineal name 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 Get In the Car 15 OMG I'm Turning White Like My Dad 25 Repugnant 35 Scat 45 Doing Time 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
"Punchy prose alternating with incantatory poems, and sometimes melding into a haibun, Kawika Guillermo's Nimrods magnifies perspectives on the father-son relationship and mixed race and ups the bar for the memoir genre. Irreverent, edgy, and-the only kind worth reading-brutally honest." - R. Zamora Linmark, author of (The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart) "Lucid about the contradictions, Nimrods is incandescent in its rage, grief, and beauty. This is the poetry-story-theory we need to survive our battered and entangled inheritances and find our way into another time, unsettled but livable." - Larissa Lai, author of (Iron Goddess of Mercy) "In this raw mix of poetry and prose, Guillermo chronicles his early life and experiences in academia as a bisexual, mixed-race man. . . . An affecting, unmistakable narrative: one in which Guillermo catalogs his difficulties, considers their effects, . . . and learns to find hope anyway. Though not for the faint of heart, this chaotic, fascinating self-portrait lingers." (Publishers Weekly) "With stylistic techniques ranging from biblical verse to punk lyric, Guillermo paints an empathetic, yet resentful picture." - Julian Forst (The Ubyssey) "As the story of one man's life, Nimrods is worthwhile due to its unconventional approach as well as Guillermo's honesty, creativity, emotional maturity, and overall skill as a writer. As something even bigger, it is an effective meditation on the power of perseverance and the possibility of reconciliation between the people we once knew and the people that we are now." - Logan Macnair (The British Columbia Review) "A dizzying blend of 'auto theory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun,' and believe it or not, 'bad Dad jokes,' it is never boring" - Gregg Shapiro (Out South Florida) "With its mixture of prose and poetry, Nimrods brings to mind Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School, as well as, due to its visual layout, print zines like Search and Destroy that acted as the dominant form of communication for punk subculture in the pre-Internet days." - Scott R. Stalcup (Journal of American Culture)
