LET ME COUNT THE WAYS

In this compelling, brutally honest memoir, acclaimed poet and teacher Tomás Q. Morín tells the story of his turbulent childhood. He grew up in a family where his handsome, charismatic, abusive father injected himself with heroin, while he and his mother kept an eye out for cops. Other kids couldn't come over unless their parents did drugs too. Looking for order and counting became his lifelong strategies for coping with the unpredictable violence of his household.

Growing up in a small town in South Texas in the eighties and nineties, poverty, machismo, and drug addiction were everywhere for Tomás Q. Morín. He was around four or five years old when he first remembers his father cooking heroin, and he recalls many times he and his mother accompanied his father while he was on the hunt for more, Tomás in the back seat keeping an eye out for unmarked cop cars, just as his father taught him. It was on one of these drives that, for the first time, he blinked in a way that evolution hadn't intended. Let Me Count the Ways is the memoir of a journey into obsessive-compulsive disorder, a mechanism to survive a childhood filled with pain, violence, and unpredictability. Morín's compulsions were a way to hold onto his love for his family in uncertain times until OCD became a prison he struggled for decades to escape. Tender, unflinching, and even funny, this vivid portrait of South Texas life challenges our ideas about fatherhood, drug abuse, and mental illness. Tomás Q. Morín is on the faculty at Rice University and Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country. He is the coeditor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, Poetry, Threepenny Review, and Narrative.