This was a solid collection of protest with a well integrated theme throughout. The words spoke to me in an eloquent but somehow haphazard way. It was a delightful read that I would easily recommend to others.

Great collection of poetry surrounding family death and grief, very honest, raw and heartbreaking. loved them!

Thank you to NetGalley and author, Ollie Schminkey, for an advance e-book copy of “Dead Dad Jokes”. This collection was a 3.5 star for me and I have rounded up to reflect the appreciation I felt for the vulnerability and honesty, presented by the author. What a strong debut!

As the description promises this poetry is definitely unflinching. I found it to be moving and brutal and it did take me aback with it’s very punch-to-the-gut style. Schminkey is a slam poet and it really comes through. While I did not listen to this book, I read it via e-book, I felt like I could hear the author’s voice. It has a very present flow and one that adds to the intimacy of the collection.

This is not my preferred style of poetry, and if you don’t like slam poetry this will not be the collection for you. While I did connect with many lines and some of the poems as a whole, the style kept me at a distance. The descriptions are, at times, a bit grotesque, though it is reflective of the state in which the narrator is living with their grief.

If this collection sounds like something you’d like, I would highly recommend picking it up. I think you’ll really connect to the subject matter and delivery.

General disclaimer - I received this book through NetGalley, and in return am giving an honest review.

Another disclaimer, I do not have a deceased family member, more specifically, I have not lost a parent, so my opinions on this book will be vastly different than someone who has experienced that loss.

I found that this poetry did a really interesting job weaving together two vastly different themes. On one end, there was very childlike, sweet, and wholesome images of spending time with their father. This was juxtaposed with graphic and twisted images of death and decomposition. I found the flipping back and forth intriguing, and it kept me on my toes. I enjoyed it. You can read the pain of the passages, the way the author humanized their dad, and how there is some exploration of death and what happens "after."

An example: "this is a place i would come to kiss boys or hold hands with girls or listen to the echo a guitar makes as it jitters out over a canyon, but, still, i imagine separating and burying each of my father's limbs across the forest." One sentence, weaving something nostalgic and sweet, with something dark and twisted.

This was outside of my own comfort zone, but i'm glad to have experienced it! The author took me to so many places through the imagery alone.

Right off from the start Ollie Schminkey pulls no punches. Everything is out in the open with the book title Dead Dad Jokes, and yet each line punches you in the gut a little harder than the last. Ollie Schminkey knows how to play with words in a way that makes you gasp, widen your eyes, and then immediately dig back into the poetry. For those who have lost a father I can start to imagine how hard this book hits home. For those of us who haven't, it makes us feel deeply. It makes us agonize in each new metaphor.

Dead Dad Jokes is a book of poetry that digs in and shows us how truly complex the grief of a parent dying can be. It is more than just losing a parent; it is caring for them while they die. It is dealing with the past of their addictions and behaviors. It is about family dynamics and relationships. It is about identity. This book has hints of Ollie Schminkey’s personal experiences embedded where we least expect it. We get a few glimpses of their sexuality and gender identity with lines such as:

“instead, my partner pets my hair gently,
like there’s nothing in this world
that can’t be fixed by petting my hair gently.
we are queer, which means
we have always known how to keep loving
even while surrounded by death.”


And

“i write my dead name in my father’s obituary.
i don’t even think about it.

my dead name doesn’t feel like such a dead name
while standing next to my dad’s corpse.”


When I read this book, I read it fast. Each line carries you like a buoy bouncing with every incoming wave. Naturally, it was both a difficult and an easy read. The language and imagery is so well-crafted that the reader almost forgets they aren’t living this person’s life; but then they start to feel the sting of their experiences. Ollie Schminkey brings their experiences to life in the smallest ways:

“his death is the threshold, and you are standing on a faded
welcome mat, peering through the doorway
into someone else’s house.”
​

The pace of this book is steady and natural. There is nothing forced about it, which with such a difficult subject seems challenging. Vulnerability has been kind to Ollie Schminkey. It allowed us to feel the truth in each line. This is a writer who has owned their voice and knows how to craft an image perfectly.

This book captures the pain of caring for a man who was absent and drunk while alive, but then while dying became soft and sober. Schminkey writes about their pain in wishing their father was a different father and now that he is, he is dying. This book goes into the struggle of caring for a weak body and seeing it in its most vulnerable; it even discusses seeing their dad’s penis. It’s something that isn’t normally considered when hearing/reading about someone caring for their dying parents. Seeing parts of them you never want to see. But something that is real and uncomfortable. Schminkey takes us there and keeps going. The uncomfortable is the truth. It is important.

Dead Dad Jokes is a book I highly recommend. It demolishes barriers. It gives an unexpected and much needed voice to grief. Ollie Schminkey is a writer who is fierce and honest. This is a needed story that changes the narrative of trauma, family, and pain.

This is a book of poetry that can only be described as TRULY UNFLINCHING. It took a mans grief and revealed all of it as it is, like the rambles of a drunk man from a sober mouth; each poem is real, scarring, relatable. It’s a moment of grief where you can’t explain the pain and you just describe everything in 1000 seconds, this book is like that.

It’s kinda angry and tearful but I really enjoyed the experience of a good poem feeling like I was being bruised.

I will say it’s a poetry book I’d only be able to go back to after having quite a distance from it, I think that there’s a really intense heaviness in these pages that’s fantastic but hard to carry without breaks in between!

I wanna thank @netgalley & @buttonpoetry for an arc of this very raw book!

I absolutely adored this collection. Ollie has such an honest voice that CUTS. I think I highlighted 50% of the book.

“you ask your sister if you can wear his old cutoffs even though they are too big, and she says, yeah, that’s basically what gay fashion is, right? and she means clothes, but you also know it is to be dressed in the death of people you love.”

They say don’t judge a book by it’s cover. This was the first book that grabbed my attention as soon as I joined NetGalley and knew that I needed to just read it. See what it had in store for me.

As soon as I had opened the ebook, I couldn’t stop reading. The way that Schminkey recalls their fathers death is so morbid… but fascinating. Beautiful. All of the same feelings of loss and recalling of memories that I had with the passing of close family members. There were feelings that I had during the grieving processes that I thought were weird, something that only I had gone through. There were times where we were given too much information. But, it added to the realness of the situation. As a reader, I was both disgusted but understood what it would have been like to experience these things as they had happened.

I desperately would like to get my hands on whatever projects this incredible author releases in the future.

Thank you to Netgalley for the arc!

One of the best modern poetry collections to date. In Dead Dad Jokes, Ollie Schminkey tackles the complexities of grieving and family.

As the title tells you, this collection is about Schminkey's father, their relationship and ultimately his death. From the beginning it's obvious that Schminkey has a knack for feeling. Each poem spins a story frozen in time, so vivid it feels as if you can picture the story he's weaving.

Dead Dad Jokes is a beautiful meditation on what it means to give, especially when there are animostitsies held with the person who's passed. The collection begs to be read physically, so you can dog-ear the pages and underline line after line. Schminkey grips you in a way that modern poetry tends not to, and that grip feels smothering at times.

If you've lost a parent you know it's a never-ending grieving process. Sometimes you wake up in tears, and other times you can't feel anything but anger. From poems about a discarded bandaid to poems about ghosts turning up at gas stations, Ollie Schminkey has crafted a sublime and cathartic poetry collection.

this was a really good collection of poems exploring death. there were none of the pretentious type poems i hate and the imagery was really strong. mostly gross, but strong nonetheless.

Brilliant, acerbic, moving writing combine with a confusion of grief and bitterness to produce this extraordinary collection. Highly recommend to anyone faced with caring for a parent who never appropriately cared for you or to anyone care taking or grieving.

These were my first thoughts after finishing reading the collection of poems:

I will be able to put it in more rational words later, but: this book feels like when you are little and you are learning to swim in a high pool for the first time, your arms are tired and you barely stay afloat, your nose fills with water and somehow you spit it out through your mouth and kick with all your might so as not to drown, you see your father in a chair, watching that you don't sink and you keep kicking with all your might, your ears full of chlorine water and your hair getting in your way.

The author recounts in verse how the life of her father, an alcoholic man, was. And how she helped him with his illness for the last years of his life.

It is a very personal text, which I am not going to "review", because I feel that I am not in a position to comment on the life and experiences of a person; who, apart from everything, we must remember, lost her father.

Dead Dad Jokes is an achingly truthful, translucent collection. It gives off major slam poetry vibes, which I really enjoyed.

It reminds me very much of Kafka. A morbid, curious take on death and the complex emotions that follow it. I loved learning more about the complicated emotions that come with having to help a parent who has been absent and unaccepting. I myself feel like this too often.

My favorite poems were “Erasure of my fathers health care directive” and “My dad died a week ago” and “I find a chunk of bone the width of my index finger.”

I have never once disliked a Button Poetry book. They know what they’re doing and I’m hobbling it up. I absolutely love Schminkey’s writing style and will definitely be reading more of their books in the future

There's something about the harsh realities of a dying relative that this collection captures almost too well. I think they captured just the right amount of discomfort to really get the point across about the author's grief. Added to that is a solid and familiar thread of queer experience woven between the poems, and I found myself grieving with them.

I found the author and their grief very relatable. I'm not usually a reader of poetry, but was sucked in by their emotions and their humour.

This book came exactly at the right time in my life. My review of this book is more personal than critical, mainly for the place it holds in my heart. I've been a fan of Ollie's writing and prose ever since finding them on youtube years ago. They've been one of my biggest inspiration, not only in terms of writing, but also in terms of embracing the person you are despite the darkness you may hold.

Dead dad jokes is harsh. Its raw and at times uncomfortable to read. Ollie tells us exactly what death looks like. they tell us how ugly death is and how it often creeps in days, weeks and even months before settling in. The poems in this book discuss things we might ignore or refuse to think about until we are forced into this situation. Grief is different for everyone. Ollie deals with their grief using humour. Humour that would probably leave a room full of people completely silent but comforted a reader miles away.

Ever since day one, Ollie has been a comfort for me, the way they string words into sentences carrying emotions and trauma they have lived which resonates in so many ways with experiences i have lived. Dead dad jokes was no exception, it is helping me deal with the grief of a loved one who has recently been diagnosed with cancer. It's making me feel seen and understood and for me personally, that is greatest thing a book can bring you.

Thank you Netgalley for the ARC
5/5 stars

This is one of those poetry collections that absolutely begs to be bought in paperback, so that you can do the pretentious thing of dog-earing every page and scribbling all over it and memorising all the best lines so that you can say them over and over again, just for the joy of hearing them out loud. 'Joy' is perhaps an odd word to apply to this particular collection, given that it's essentially 80 or so pages of unrelenting grief, but there really is an odd sort of joy to be found in reading a work which takes someone's particular experience and manages to make it both entirely singular and of the poet, but also something that the reader can experience.

I know there are reasons that this book speaks to me. Like the poet, I've held the hand of someone I love as they die. I've been there for the undignified end, seen the way a body changes when there's no life in it, wondered how everyone and everything else can just keep going on like the world hasn't ended, when I just saw it happen. And that's the exact feeling that this collection manages to make manifest. The bizarreness of sitting at a party, as the poet describes, while everyone else around you is having fun, and all you can think about is how different someone's face looks when they've been dead for half an hour. The unrelenting urge to speak out about it, the way you want to be asked about it but also don't ever want anyone else to know what you saw, the way everyone else's problems are nothing in the face of your grief. These feelings are at once universal to anyone who's ever been bereaved and also entirely personal on the part of the poet; no-one's grief is ever the same, even when they've lost the same person, and I think Schminkey really excels in conveying the complexities of grieving someone.

Honestly, there's so much that could be said about this one that I don't even know where to start. The language is often beautiful, often surprisingly funny - some reviewers have commented negatively on Schminkey's use of humour, as though it diminishes their grief, when actually anyone who's ever been in a similar position will tell you that it's literally the only way you can cope with the enormity of watching someone die, and in my mind it also added some much-needed levity to the book, albeit a rather dark flavour thereof - and every single poem, even the ones which feel the least polished, stands entirely on its own merit, whilst also pulling the narrative of the collection through. Grief isn't the only subject of the poems; queerness, addiction, fatherhood, found/chosen family and the gendered nature of 'care' are all themes that Schminkey weaves in alongside it, and which make it feel less like a monotonous treatise on death. It's nuanced and clever and brilliant and I really do just want to haul a copy of this book around with me forever.

This isn't a collection to read if you aren't in the right frame of mind, but for anyone who's ever experienced anything like the poet has, reading it feels like being witnessed and recognised in a way that speaks to the cleverness of Schminkey's work, and I'm absolutely going to be looking out for whatever they write next.

Thank you to NetGalley, Ollie Schminkey, and Button Poetry for the opportunity to read Dead Dad Jokes in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book seeking a narrative told in poetic form, as I have not read something like that in a while and was craving reading something in that style. I knew this book would be a serious downhill spiral, but the themes and topics addressed in this book send a powerful message.

The over-laying concept is grief of the loss of a father, but so much more than that. Watching his downhill spiral to death, and the raw, gross images of death itself and having to be the one to find or take care of the body, as it were. Not only is the imagery in this book grossly stunning, but the sense of smell hits home with a powerful punch.

Underneath the ways of seeing and handling grief is also the family dynamic of the narrator, who was born female, but seems to identify as either male or nonbinary. These moments are both striking and subtle all at the same time. I could not find anywhere that this is a factual story or a memoir, but after reading the author's bio, I certainly feel like this reflects Ollie's story with immense parts of their own personal experience.

Even though this is quite serious, the reader can really feel the dripping anger, the satirical sarcasm at times, a tangible presence. My favorite part of the novel, shamelessly, is where the author actually has a whole page of what they call "dead dad jokes." the sequel to what we know as "dad jokes." I laughed out loud and even highlighted that section to share with friends and family who might get a kick out of morbid humor. But is that not part of the point? One of the best ways to deal with grief is by finding a way to laugh.

This narrative has an abundance of power to its message, and there is so much to gain from the serious, humorous oxymoron of a book. A great debut with fantastic topics that society can learn a thing or two from.

Ollie Schminkey weaves a macabre and raw picture of the honest truth about watching a loved one die. They masterfully make the "othering" feeling of hearing about death connect in an honest and thoughtful way.

Throughout the book they speak on putting aside one's own hang-ups when dealing with the death of an abuser, and how it feels to use their deadname and the wrong gender identity throughout the process. Grief and the grieving process is a large part of this collection of poems, it's intimate in a way that makes you feel part of the story without feeling intrusive. (That is until they start talking about the penis.)

Overall I was highly impressed by the intensity and the bluntness towards death Schminkey captures and I'm hoping it will help others in similar situations.

3.5/5✨: I genuinely enjoyed the content of the book and the imagery was (at times gross but in a good way) and so moving but I often found it draining. I know the topic of the collection of poems deals with the passing of an absent father figure and the grief that comes along with being a carer for a dying loved one. But at times, I just had a stop and walk away from it cause it was too much. Maybe that was the purpose it. Maybe I'm not the target audience for the book but it was emotionally exhausting.

I did love reading the poems out loud as I'm a huge fan of spoken word because of the sound work and hearing the lines in the air. But at times, these stories felt more like venting then storytelling. The poems kept repeating moments that it made it less impact. I think this book would have benefited from some cuts so that it focused on the beautiful yet sad stories it had to tell.

But obviously, I'm not bashing the book or its ideals. I just think the emotions in the piece might have been top raw and complex for a wide audience. This book is great, it's just not for everyone. So keep that in mind when picking it book up, be aware for a heavy read that might make you force you to be uncomfortable and face the grief of a stranger.