I’m so grateful to Jake Wolff and the editors at The Florida Review for publishing this poem about fatherhood in their latest issue.
“Catechism” came out of a workshop I was privileged to take with Camille Dungy at the Minnesota Northwoods’ Writers Conference in 2019. We were asked to cut up old drafts of poem (literally, with scissors), go outside for an hour, and to work into the poem whatever we observed. She also gave us randomly-selected sections of a thesaurus which is where the title (and through-line) of the poem came from. It’s turned me into a believer in flipping to random pages of my thesaurus.