Just Kidding by Dion Farquhar

Dion Farquhar’s poems are driven by the desire to make sense of the experience of raising children – both the sublime and the “Abu Graib” moments. Her narratives are convincing and lay bare how the world suddenly and irreversibly changes with parenthood and how everything is seen with new eyes.  Language itself is turned on its head.  Power dynamics are explored. Equality and resistance are given their due. Ultimately, these poems are about the hard-earned struggle to find freedom in radical engagement with those beings entrusted to one’s care, to come to terms with otherness, both our own and those we love.

–Terri Drake

Spontaneity is maybe the hardest illusion to pull off in a poem, but Dion Farquhar doesn’t waste time making more of a virtue of it than it already is without the wince of artifice: she and Marsh have twin boys to raise! So she has every reason to take for granted an uncomplicated sympathy among her readers, whom she talks to as if they’re old friends, who knew her long before Matt and Alex were born. Just Kidding is a handful of snapshots of these boys, from birth to college, with the lives of their mother and father—vast archives the kids will only understand when they themselves have become reciprocals of their parents—in the background. Anyone who’s ever been a mother or had a mother will already know many of the folk songs in this chapbook by heart.
–Jeffrey Gustavson, former editor, Epiphany magazine