Dillard, Todd: Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance

Variant Lit, chapbook

Publication Date: October 31, 2024

Publisher Marketing: 

The titular father of Todd Dillard’s marvelous chapbook Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance quickly tells us “It’s my job to find the dead.” And so he does, navigating surfaced graveyards, insistent ghosts, a pandemic veiling the planet, all while his daughter and other children burst through like “[the] chimney on my house spears the dusk of each day.” Like swallows through an open window, “They know the way.” Dillard takes us to a museum of walls, on flight lessons, adding imagery and nuance to our understanding of a “whole life / contemplating the knife’s edge, / sharpest, like death, / when no light thorns its length.” Yet these poems reveal that light, as a moon’s reflection sewn into a lake’s night surface and an origami swan sunning in the windowsill, as names we use to find one another in life and dreams.

—Ben Kline, author of It Was Never Supposed To Be

In Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance, Todd Dillard writes “I will show you how you can / make a sky out of anything,” and this collection takes small moments between a father and daughter and makes of them something to marvel at. These poems perfectly marry the impossible with the possible, the surreal with the pedestrian. We move from the strange to the startlingly tender so seamlessly, as unsuspecting as a baby being rocked to sleep. The speaker of these poems looks at his own history, at the harshness of the world, and responds by archiving the beauty of his daughter’s singing, the brightness of her Hello Kitty shoes by the front door. And we get to witness a father’s earnest, tender, and sometimes hilarious attempts to build his daughter a world beautiful and safe enough for them to dance inside of it together.

—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times

Todd Dillard’s newest collection of poetry Ragnarök at the Father-Daughter Dance unwinds a slow tune to the backdrop of the pandemic, showing us that parenting can feel like a full symphony without the sheet music. Even in all of this, these poems make light of the dark. Dillard writes, “She says / if I’m scared I could practice, could jump in / over and over again, eventually it’ll be fine,” and in the arms of our beloved, it will be. Todd shows us that even though parents are supposed to teach their children, there is often so much to be learned from our observant and imaginative youth.

—Jason B. Crawford, author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz