Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers

Candace de Taeye’s debut full-length collection of poetry, Small Planes and the Dead Fathers of Lovers, explores with wit and sincerity ideas of family, relationship, and home. Beginning with poems of movement and travel, the book develops diverse and wide-ranging meditations on what it means to be at home in a place, to grow into it, and then also eventually to leave it. The poetry itself makes full use of the physical page, occupying each corner and making itself comfortable there, visually paralleling the process of being at home that it describes. The imagery moves by pairing seemingly disconnected ideas, strangers to one another, and then coaxing their more subtle connections into visibility, mirroring the way that the collection represents human relationships. The result is a book that provokes reflection on our uncertain contemporary experience of home and relationship in ways that readers will find both emotionally and intellectually compelling.