Dark Fathers and Other Poems (Paperback or Softback)

-Professor Todd Neuman, Editor Emeritus, The Hurricane Review.

In Dark Fathers, David Anthony Sam picks at the scab of childhood memories wreathed in ribbons of his father’s cigarette smoke. His father was a man “who knew love / only as a hard, thin edge / of glinting blue steel / scraping across his cheek. Through poems suffused with a mixture of anger and regret, Sam bleeds his personal history onto the page and transforms it into a universal truth that all fathers and sons will take to heart.

-Bill Glose, author of Virginia Walkabout, Personal Geography, Half a Man, and The Human Touch

In Dark Fathers and Other Poems, David Anthony Sam holds a match to the fuse of familial tension. His reflective vignettes smolder with a desire for acceptance, love, and forgiveness that refuses to remain in the attic with discarded childhood toys. This poet dares to examine his self-image through unblinking eyes in a “face too like my father's.” As sharp edges of the past soften with time and distance, David embraces an identity dependent upon, yet independent of, the paternal relationship: “you flow here / in my transient river,” a river that “drifts with silence towards / the open prayer of ocean.” This lyrical journey evokes the beautiful ache that defines so many human bonds.

-Elizabeth Spencer Spragins, author of The Language of Bones: American Journeys Through Bardic Verse and With No Bridle for the Breeze: Ungrounded Verse.