Amorak Huey
Garfield Minus Garfield
It has become a thing that every so often in America the romantic texts and emails between two
inappropriately involved people become public in the wake of a scandal. Without fail they are
humiliating to read, the worst kind of obituary for a love affair. Someone else’s hunger matters only if
there’s at least the possibility it’s directed at you. In the absence of actual desire, our attempts to
express desire are banal as a dry sink in an empty apartment behind a dying mall in a Midwestern
suburb that used to be a field where pheasants nested. If you remove the cat from the comic strip
about the cat, the result is nihilism: a sad man talking to himself about death. If you remove the moon
from a love poem, is it now an elegy? Or, it was elegy from the start.
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Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize.
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