Care Taking: Poems is a visceral exploration of growing up too soon. As the child of two wheelchair users, Johnny Byutorie became a caregiver early—navigating a home shaped by unspoken grief, everyday struggle, and the long shadows of inherited trauma. At its core is a father who never reckoned with his own pain, passing it on instead. These poems confront the brutal entanglements of duty, depression, and love, emerging from fire with clarity and grit. In the tradition of Sharon Olds and Richard Siken, Care Taking offers an unflinching portrait of a life forged in care and scarred by a life of parentification.

Praise for Care Taking:

The raw, conversational poems of Care Taking plumb memory, particularly about the challenges and convolutions of family. Much of the collection orbits around the father, who creates wreckage and heartbreak in his wake but is still loved. Using the colloquial language of pure energy, the poet refuses to let anyone off the hook—including himself—in forceful narratives about substance abuse, depression, self-destructive thoughts, violence, illness, and death. The book also interrogates the discursive nature of memory and finds its way, by the end, out of the father’s shadow and into the promises and hopes of the poet’s own fatherhood.

—Doug Ramspeck, author of Smoke Memories

In midwestern bars, hospitals, diners, and backyards, Johnny Byutorie shows a talent for picking out the heartbreaking details in a saga of familial violence, innocence, and grief. He nails a mood of gloomy nostalgia complicated by a knowledge of adult cruelty yet leavened by the ordinary magic of tourist traps and sun tea.

—Joule K. Zelman, author, critic, and bookseller

Johnny Byutorie’s poetry is part memoir, part future-hope, but never in his writing does nostalgia gloss over the inconvenience of reality. This collection reads like a backroads, cross-country drive in a beat-up gas-guzzler: headlight-at-midnight blinding one moment, glorious sunrise on the horizon the next. As Byutorie maps his way through the atlas of past, present, and future, his writing is lit up with the glimpses of transcendent beauty that are found in even the darkest of moments if only someone is paying attention. Johnny Byutorie pays attention, and as a result, we are gifted these poems like photos from a pre-digital childhood—grainy but real, no social-media touchups, lingering in the imagination long after reading, their pain and beauty poignant reminds of the power of resilience.

—Tabitha Bozeman, Editor-in-Chief, Cardinal Arts Journal

This enchanting journey through the stained fabric of generational trauma and the bleakness of vanishing youth will take your breath away. It is a fractal of pain that culminates in a beautiful tribute to a forward-looking brightness that exists not because of or in consequence of the building blocks of suffering but simply alongside them. Beautiful things come along, and you can find them in the damnedest places.

As a child who dealt with child abuse, poverty, exclusion, and misfortune in my own life, I felt like the whole of my experience was echoed back to me in a resonant catharsis that demonstrates our experiences don’t have to be alike to be similar. Our emotions arise from different antecedents, our stories aren’t the same, but we arrive on a spectrum well-trodden by other lives that came before us, and striding into Blue 34, Red 17, Yellow 9 at any moment will put us in deep harmony with a billion other souls who have also found themselves in that color.

You will thank yourself for taking the time to sit with this book. This is no jukebox anthology of assembled works, it is a story. It is a hundred stories.

—Anna McDermott, artist and activist