A collection that offers a captivating mosaic of a poet’s interior life.
A volume of poetry focuses on dreams, memories, and thought experiments.
In this collection, Salinas explores both himself—a Hispanic man, a Texas poet, a Roman Catholic, a wordsmith—and society. Though the author has coined the term “Hispanic sonnet,” explaining that it’s “a 15-line, free-verse poem with a separated last line as its own stanza,” he doesn’t limit himself to this invented form. Dreams are a central theme, often starring literary icons like Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez. In one such dream, the speaker erroneously compliments his date, Harper Lee, on To Kill a Bald Eagle: “Harper Lee snorted / And her Blizzard dribbled out her nose as though / She’d sneezed.” The writing life is a recurring theme: “I dreamt I had a homework assignment / Due yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day / After & each day forever—it was called / Being A Writer.” In “Audacity,” Salinas fantasizes about “obliterating you with ruthless poetry.” Contemplating life vis-a-vis the beloved denim jacket his grandfather left him, the poet observes that “many things don’t fit anymore.” At a Barnes & Noble cafe, he critiques a high schooler reading Foucault. Pop-culture touchstones are also scattered throughout. Kurt Cobain and Goethe mingle in one poem; Kanye West and Indiana Jones appear in another. Salinas uses vivid and inventive imagery, from a “pimpled ceiling as constellation” to “sherbet skies” and the “velvet tongue of our brutal fathers.” He deftly contemplates contradictions: “The most alive person I know / Is dead” and the way his “brown-skinned childhood hero— / My godfather—glorified Trump’s MAGA-red crusade.” He also injects subtle humor in lines like “A lover once asked: / ‘How do you write / Beautifully?’ / I replied: / ‘Be born ugly.’” Many of the poems read like fever dreams: “As I lay dying / With spiders in my mind / The plumpest calls himself / William Faulkner.” But some of the poetic experiments fall flat, including “A little help from my friends,” which is a compilation of random comments on unrelated topics.
A collection that offers a captivating mosaic of a poet’s interior life.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781953447227
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Flowersong Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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