An earnest, if disjointed, reflection on life’s end and its aftermath.
Hagood explores the nature of life after death in this unconventional collection of prose poems about grief.
“All I want to do since losing my father is molt in my nest,” the author begins this book, which she later describes as a “séance.” In the book’s first section, “Death as the Ulysses of Desperate Housewives,” she tells of grief manifesting as compulsive Google searches about ghosts, binge-reading about death, and translating foreign recipes, then cooking while listening to audiobooks. She makes a list of talking points “in case I ever get to speak to my father again. You never know,” and contemplates how writing can be a kind of time machine, returning her to when her dad was still alive. The second section, “Death as the Beginning of Dracula,” backtracks to her father’s rapid deterioration from cancer: “He’s unconscious, one cyclopean eye ajar but unseeing, still green but clouded,” she reports. His mortality also prompts contemplation about the author’s mother’s eventual demise, then her own: “What if I were to see death as the most gorgeous part of life? Or, more particularly, as something audacious that exceeds life?” she wonders. In the third section, “Death as Furiosa,” set after her dad’s death, Hagood takes a broader look at the world around her, including wars abroad, neighborhood violence, and online vitriol. Throughout, she incorporates philosophy, literature, pop culture, and SF references—from Cicero and Ray Bradbury to Blade Runnerand the Star Warssaga’s Yoda—into her wide-ranging examinations. As a result, the narrative can feel overly scattered at times, veering from film commentary to parenting anecdotes to the consequences of a viral climate change tweet. Hagood’s observations on the parallels between writing and mourning are particularly astute in lines such as “all writers are mediums, talking daily with the deceased, resurrecting, bringing back ghost truths from the underworld.” Her prose poems are equally creative in their descriptions, such as one of New York City as “a dead cement isle” where “commuters step over people sleeping on the subway platform like they were plastic bags.”
An earnest, if disjointed, reflection on life’s end and its aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781963908503
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 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
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SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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