Overview

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.

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9781478024927

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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 on the memoir genre. Irreverent, edgy, and, the only kind worth reading about-brutally honest. -- R. Zamora Linmark, author of * The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart *

Punchy prose alternating with incantatory poems, and sometimes melding into a haibun, Kawika Guillermo's Nimrods magnifies perspectives on father-son relationship and mixed race, and ups the bar on the memoir genre. Irreverent, edgy, and, the only kind worth reading about-brutally honest. -- R. Zamora Linmark, author of * The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart *

Author Information

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.

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