Father Myself

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; the pandemic; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.

In 2022, James McDermott lost his sixty-year-old father to COVID after three weeks in intensive care. In* Father Myself*, his second collection from Nine Arches Press, McDermott explores his father’s complex illness and death; grief; growth and how as a queer boy then a bereaved son, he had to learn to father himself.

In clear-sighted and often hard-hitting poems, McDermott takes the reader onto the frontline of the pandemic – documenting the experience and trauma of a COVID-bereaved family with an unflinching eye. Both powerful and compassionate, these extraordinary poems have the capacity to go beyond simply a record of events, reaching sensitively for the human details that matter – the beat of a heart and movement of breath, the touch of a hand, the words we use for goodbye.

• | Author: James McDermott
• | Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 20, 2025
• | Number of Pages:
• | Language:
• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781916760103
• | ISBN-10: 1916760104