Cryptic, sometimes-baffling works whose intense, colorful language captures the imagination.
A set of enigmatic poems that limn the inner workings of relationships.
Matos, a bisexual-plus author who’s an English professor at the City Colleges of Chicago and a former mixed martial arts fighter, explores a number of personal and confessional themes in these autobiographical works. He hymns his working-class Portuguese American family, despite their difficulty in comprehending his sexuality, and revisits pop-cultural touchstones from his childhood in the 1980s and ’90s—Prince and Madonna songs, Tony Danza’s fetching presence in Who’s the Boss—and their roles in tutoring his desires. Most of all, he dissects convoluted feelings and ironies of love affairs with men, women, and, sometimes, both at once. Matos’ verse often sounds like an address to a lover, full of private intimacies that the reader can’t fully understand. The resolute interiority of this poetry of conflicted yearnings can make it challenging to decipher. At times, the author’s imagery has an abstract tenor that’s arid and uninvolving: “Recall that you are largely rhetorical [anyway] / having evolved to where being used and being useful has little distinction.” At other times, his metaphors are hallucinatory and full of impact, though still puzzling: “She breaks without speaking takes from a muttering of shoulders / a measure of the wreck of us.” Still, these poems are packed with moments of imagistic and emotional power. A few of them, for example, gleefully rub the reader’s nose in a gross earthiness (“like a wet sticky foal / sticky as the bottom of your son’s shoe that never misses / the fresh pile of dog turds near the elementary school”) or offer a tender lyricism with a fairy-tale ring: “He married a woman once / who knew something about singing / and thought his days would be filled with song.”
Cryptic, sometimes-baffling works whose intense, colorful language captures the imagination.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9913780-2-9
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Deeply moving and emotional.
A hockey player falls in love with his tutor.
Matt “Freddy” Fredderic is the life of the party at Waterfell University. He’s a starter on the hockey team and can have any girl on campus—but he’s also in danger of failing out if he can’t improve his grades in math and biology. His ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia make him eligible for university tutoring services, and Ro Shariff is his newly assigned tutor. Ro had a crush on Freddy freshman year but convinced herself that she’s over it now, in her senior year. She’s been in an on-again, off-again relationship with a guy named Tyler for the past two years, but he’s manipulative, borderline abusive, and probably cheating on her. Ro is desperate for love and affection and still suffers from bouts of intense homesickness. She and Freddy develop a tentative friendship even though they couldn’t be more different on the surface—he’s a popular, gregarious athlete to her quiet, introverted academic. Ro sees beyond Freddy’s persona as a dumb jock, while he recognizes that she feels lonely and like an outsider. When Freddy swoops in to rescue Ro after an ugly disagreement with Tyler, the two admit that their feelings for each other are more romantic than friendly. Corinne’s second novel is an emotional powerhouse. Ro and Freddy share everything with each other: fears of not being good enough for their friends, details of their harmful previous romantic relationships, and the deep feelings of grief related to illness and loss of parents. They have to learn to trust themselves and each other in the midst of the pressures that come with transitioning from college to adulthood. Their evolution from friends to lovers is a classic slow burn, and it makes for an angsty and deeply affecting read.
Deeply moving and emotional.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068489
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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