Dean Bakopoulos' "some memories of my father" uses the rhetorical device of anaphora -- or deliberate repetition of words, phrases, and verbal constructions -- in order to provide an emotional and intellectual structure to the proagonist's experience of the loss of his father. Bakopoulos' "some memories of my father" is primarily a mood piece, a kind of prose-poem which gets its restrained emotional force from poetic devices (chiefly anaphora): it stands as the second chapter to his short and casually surreal 2005 Detroit-set novel Please Don't Come Back From The Moon: "some memories of my father" does not invoke the overall surrealism of Bakopoulos' central narrative thread until the final sentence. Otherwise, the prose here is intended to be evocative word-painting, and it gets its power from its rhetorical structure.

The first segment of "some memories of my father" begins with a wealth of concrete details: in a sense, this...
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