An honest and incisive exploration of life’s loveliness that occasionally overcomplicates its message.
Shea explores how we carry the past, embody the present, and move toward the future in this collection of poems.
The collection opens with “Please Give Me Your Ars,” a reflection on wildfires and how people have become desensitized to their destruction. In “Blood Beloved,” the poet juxtaposes the “relics” of her ancestors (bone china, salt and pepper shakers, a butter dish) with the beautiful chaos of grandchildren (Legos, Pokemon cards, plastic guns). In “Pop Art Super Market,” the speaker wonders what it would be like to approach the grocery store from a 6-year-old’s perspective, through which all of the cereal boxes are “bright toys / to be thrown on the floor.” “The Slick Slope” recounts how the poet’s husband signed them up for Ski Patrol, observing, “Nobody sees me / when I take a drastic spill / then pick myself up again.” On her wedding anniversary, she tries to reconcile the expectation of a “bejeweled” gift with the reality of practical housewares. In nature-themed poems, the author describes poplars “exchanging intimacies” and revels in the bounty of a pear tree. Several poems address the collateral damage of aging, from scarred breasts in “Dimpled” to worsening sight in “Eyeglasses.” Shea’s descriptions are intricate and evocative; a phalaenopsis orchid has “leathery, oblong leaves / shaped like rabbit ears” and a “rouged moth mouth.” The poet’s truth-telling is bold and brave, as evidenced by her confession that “[She] wanted more children. [She] wanted / to become pregnant over and over”; instead, she kept this longing a secret and took the pill. Her love for her family is sincere but not saccharine in lines like, “Dearest creatures, my beloved blood / from a galaxy of nebulous deeds / beings magnetic and malleable, / you are the result of bygone pleasures and chance.” Some language is more difficult to decipher—lines like “Think vespertine, flourishing in the evening: / crepuscular. I crave an innocent gloaming” may stymie some readers.
An honest and incisive exploration of life’s loveliness that occasionally overcomplicates its message.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781963115338
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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