Tell Me about Your Bad Guys

“In Michael Dowdy’s superb essay collection Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, a father thinks through what it means to raise a child while reckoning with all that is terrifying and broken in this world. Here we bear witness to the tender intimacy between parent and child, which simultaneously never lets us look away from climate change, gun violence, the migrant crisis, and more. These agile, moving investigations of how to love and think are a must-read for anyone trying to care for another in a violent world, which is to say, everyone.”—Tessa Fontaine, author of The Red Grove

“In Tell Me about Your Bad Guys Michael Dowdy sets out to write a lyrical and critical book about fathers, fathering, and raising a daughter in the Anthropocene. He accomplishes this task with bravery and clarity, but his engaging and powerful book does much more. Through an intricate weaving of poetry, literary sleuthing, personal history, and ecocriticism, Dowdy ingeniously extends genre boundaries to allow us to see how, in the right hands, poignant discussions of vulnerability, money, race, economics, and our very own survival can all come together as art to ask the most difficult questions about who we are and how we live in a world that is always destroying itself.”—Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award–winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human

“Many fatherhood-themed books are heavily memoiristic, telling specific stories and charting a linear narrative forward. Tell Me about Your Bad Guys distinguishes itself by being more inward-turning and experimenting with form. It raises questions about those more traditional renderings of fatherhood by revealing the complexity that often gets blurred out in order to produce a cogent narrative. The essays do more than tell stories—they engage the larger questions of our time and do so with an evocative style.”—Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry