A Beginner’s Guide to Becoming Your Parents is a collection of poems that function as an operating manual for navigating the adult machine through the modern world. Mastery of that machine, however, is contingent on a working knowledge of its component parts. Thus, A Beginner’s Guide aims first to teach the reader how to fall in love, put down roots, and let go of angst. These are also the book’s three parts, each of which is voiced by a single speaker. Sometimes contemplative and full of wisdom, and other times nostalgic and wholly unreliable, the speaker reflects on a stalled coming of age and the great lengths he must still go to mask dysfunction. His is a path forward towards goodness, marked by frivolity, near tragedy, and a few lucky breaks consistent to a generation.