DADDY by Jake Byrne

DADDY is a powerful look at patriarchy, intergenerational trauma, and queer desire that seeks an unravelling of systems of control to reclaim vulnerability. At once confessional, playful, and sonically meticulous, Byrne’s poems seek conversation with a voice in the mind that won’t quiet. Cruel father figures dissolve into leather-clad muscle daddies on popper-scented dancefloors; the pain of the past sows the seeds of a joyful exploration of queer desire.

Praise for DADDY:

“I thought i knew desire. I thought i knew raging at the world around; but Jake Byrne shows me the limits of my imagination and fantasy. DADDY is no abstraction. It is instead, the material cost of living a radical life.”
– Khashayar Mohammadi, author of Daffod*ls and G: Fricatives

“DADDY makes me feel shock and bliss, both at once. It also makes me laugh a lot – but the funny bits actually feel like a mere byproduct of Byrne’s incredible understanding of how the world really, truly is.”
– Ben Ladouceur, author of I Remember Lights and Mad Long Emotion

Jury Citations:

“Emotionally affecting, smart, and propulsive, Jake Byrne’s Daddy uses poetry as an act of intimate world building. By synthesizing different modes of writing – dialogic constructions, theatrical forms of address, an essayistic expository voicing, Byrne creates a contemporary mode of writing – one that does that evasive thing: it accommodates the full dimensions of a life.”
– from the jurors of the 2025 Trillium Book Award for Poetry