Dustin Parsons, “Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams” (U Georgia Press, 2018)

New Books in Literature · Nov 7, 2018 · 46m

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto…