One of the more powerful moments in one’s life can be the death of a parent. However complex our family relationships, they affect us lifelong. Included in those powerful moments are some of our childhood memories, or the memory of watching our own children grow and leave the nest. These are some of the main topics in Scott Bade’s new poetry collection, Preemptive Elegy (Kelsey Books, December 2024). Bade teaches poetry at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and Kalamazoo College.
“This whole book, unfortunately, came about after my father passed away in May 2020,” Bade says. “As most people who are writers would do, I began focusing and thinking a lot about my father and writing a lot about my father. Then it occurred to me, you know what, I’m thinking a lot about fatherhood and parenting, and at the same time, I realized that there’s probably a theme here, a line I could follow. I started digging through other poems I had written before he passed away, and I realized I did have a lot of poems about being a father, about parenting, about relating to childhood.”
And so, Preemptive Elegy was born. Other family bonds contributed, with cover art by Bade’s brother, Matt Bade, and section breaks by son, August Bade, and author photo by son Stuart Bade.
“I do think [poetry] can be very therapeutic,” Bade says. “It definitely has helped me, certainly with processing the grief and the death of my father. It was by far the most significant death that I’ve experienced in my life. I had understood grief from a distance before, but this was my initiation or entry into the country of grief. It’s much larger, much more intimate than what I had known before.”
Bade’s chapbook, My Favorite Thing About Desire, was a co-winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook contest. His award-winning poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and his poems have appeared in Fugue, Shadowgraph, Reed Magazine, Foothill, and elsewhere.
Bade will be reading along with poet Elizabeth Bullmer at 2:30 p.m. on September 13 at the Zhang Legacy Collections Center at Western Michigan University.
Listen to WMUK's Story Beat every Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.
