A heartfelt and resonant collection of poetry.
A volume of poems focused on nature and humanity.
Allen explores geography, emotions, and family in this collection. In the opening poem, the Vermont-based author luxuriates in nature, admiring birds, while others attempt to photograph the sunset over Lake Champlain. A musical ode to the Green Mountain State inspires the speaker and her friends to dance and rejoice, “united in the knowledge of the gift we call home.” She and a companion hunt for wild onions in “Foraging.” “Open Water” describes a meet-cute scene in a pet store. A June-themed poem recalls the youthful joy of bike rides, rope bracelets, and snow cones during the “season of endless possibility.” Later, relaxing after a hike, the speaker predicts that “someday I will wish / to be back in this moment.” After recounting a sweet memory of her mother in “Krummholz,” she realizes “there’s no one left now / to love me that way.” As a mother herself, she finds refuge in a greenhouse while her daughter spends eight days in a hospital, “under fluorescent lights / and heated blankets, / working on not dying.” Later, the speaker details the “synchronous / solitary vigils” of the other parents in the children’s hospital family lounge. In another poem, she observes her daughter at the age of 15, trying to reconcile the many “versions of you.” Allen’s descriptions and insights are awe-inspiring. Her lively language will grab readers’ attention in lines like “the screen door smacked a goodbye” and “the fireplace / hummed orange”; they’ll easily envision the “twisted persistent trees” and the “black fly heat” the poet describes. Though the book itself is slim, the poems are weighty with emotion. Describing the unique pain of losing a sibling in “Brotherhood of the Brotherless,” Allen writes: “There should be an asterisk / on everything that comes after.” There’s also a discreet sensuality in lines like “I lifted the covers and slid in beside you / my chilled limbs seeking yours.” But “Hope Is a Voice,” a piece for poet Amanda Gorman, feels out of place in this work.
A heartfelt and resonant collection of poetry.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781578691906
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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