Overview

The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted is a 2025 poetry collection by Jason O'Toole, featuring illustrations by his son, Alexander O'Toole, with cover art by famed European street artist Hello The Mushroom (Sara Lucas), published by Dead Man's Press Ink. The Second Edition also features a selection of artworks inspired by the poems, by members of The Collage Club headquartered in Norway with members worldwide. The book is a deeply emotional and personal work, exploring themes of fatherhood, love, loss, and societal critique through poems inspired by his son's art, with a focus on the experience of a transgender child.

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Reviews

""Jason O'Toole uses grief as fuel, finding ways to honor his late son, Alex, and to remind us over and over why a more just world, which includes everyone, is so worth fighting for. The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted made me weep at times, and at other points pulled me back to my own life, with its righteous call to change what remains broken in our culture, even while seeing: ""There are more colors in the rainbow/than stars in the sky."" These poems are clear-eyed, self-effacing, and above all, radically honest at a time when we need the deepest human truths more than ever."" James Crews, author of Turning Toward Grief and Breathing Room ""Jason O'Toole breaks his heart to show it how big it is. In this tender, uninhibited collection, he defines what it means to be a man in any context-in backseat singing fatherly devotion, in awkward gentleness, in repentant honesty. He extends the image of a man through his son, Alex, flitting across the pages: a young man wanting to be a father, working for dreams, and magnifying the colors of rainbows just by being himself. Just as O'Toole uses soft hands to remember and love, he hardens them to admonish the society ready to hang the innocent from trees-using his softest words to protect them from the sharpest nails. At times a scathing critique, at times a delicious look into the motivations of those around us, this collection is, at its core, a shield of love."" Willie Carver is a queer hillbilly. His collection, Gay Poems for Red States, is a Book Riot Best Book of 2023, a Read Appalachia Top Ten Best Book of Appalachia, an American Booksellers Association's must-have book of 2022, a 2023 American Library Association Top Ten Over-The-Rainbow book, and a 2024 Stonewall Book Award Honor Book. ""THE STRANGE MISGIVINGS OF THE SADLY GIFTED is a torrent of emotion. it begins with the short poem Last Supper and the last line ""Do this in memory of me"" begins the devastating path of poems from the love that blooms out of Jason's memories for his son Alexander. beautiful and harmonious, loud and sad - this collection is a gorgeous life of poems for a son. i cried love tears, happy tears, sad tears. it is a truth, a memorial and a repercussion, clarified in the poem The Wasting Hands that fatherly poem, the loving poem, the caring poem-the poem that speaks how humans can be demoralized: ""They could have known/if they ran a blood test/But trans healthcare/is out of pocket."" this collection has so much greatness to it, i want to spill so many lines here. each poem swells inside me like a flooded bank of a river wanting to pull me under so that i can be tossed around. this book tosses you around: ""What shall I do with my child's ashes?"" the first section is written around the artwork from his son Alexander."" john compton (b. 1987), author of 17 books/chapbooks, is a gay poet who lives in kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs, cats, and mice. his latest full-length book is ""my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost foreve

Author Information

Jason O'Toole is Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Andover, MA and was co-founder of the Anne Bradstreet Poetry Contest. He serves on the advisory board of the New England Poetry Club, and as treasurer of the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco. He is the recipient of the 2025 Amy Lowell Prize. He serves as a judge for the Tom Nattell Peace Poetry Prize and the Capital District Slam Poetry Festival in NY. His newest collection is The Strange Misgivings of the Sadly Gifted (Dead Man's Press Ink). Recent poems and prose have appeared in the anthology Love is for All of Us (Storey Publishing), as well as Wednesday Magazine, Ghost City Press, The Somerville Times, and Phil Lit. The Collage Club is a group of +- 50 contemporary collage artists who dismantle the same book and reconstruct it into art, one page a week . Every week a new page is chosen. Every member makes a collage with it using analog collage techniques. Alexander O'Toole was born in Stockbridge, GA on January 25, 2003. He grew up outside of Atlanta and in his early teens was a member of the wrestling team, was a soloist with his school chorus and active in 4-H. At 14, he was the youngest member of the Oxford, GA Parks Committee. Alex developed and taught a STEM camp for children at the Washington Street Community Center in Covington, GA. Formerly a segregated school for people of color, the mission of this community center inspired Alex to advocate for justice and equality. Alex founded the first LGBTQ student organization at his high school as no such support existed and fought to ensure gender neutral bathrooms were provided. Alex graduated from Newton County High School with a 4.1 GPA and attended Georgia State University remotely during the pandemic. At 18, Alex relocated to Schenectady, NY to live with his paternal grandmother. Alex had a green-thumb and loved working with plants. He found working Faddegon's Nursery to be an ideal fit. He was to be promoted to the green house after the summer season and enjoyed both the work and the friendships made there. Art, music, and writing were important to Alex, and he expressed himself authentically through these media. Alex was accepted at State University of New York at Schenectady and had plans on transferring to Cornell to pursue a career in either horticulture or medicine. Alex passed unexpectedly on September 8, 2021, at Ellis Hospital. He was surrounded by his father, and paternal grandfather and grandmother.

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