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WESTERN SKIES

A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.

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Lonesome people inhabit a forlorn landscape in this poetic and photographic meditation on Texas.

Smith, an Austin-based singer/songwriter, arranges poems, song lyrics, brief essays, and photos into “a love song to the mythology of Texas.” The book’s soul resides in its dozens of images of the West Texas plains, which show scrubby, arid prairies with tufts of grass, weedy tendrils, clumps of trees—often bare and wintry—and the occasional yucca; the land dimly stretches away under threatening clouds until it meets hills that either sparkle with promise under a shaft of sunlight or form a black, imprisoning wall. The human presence is seen in artifacts: highways and railroad tracks converging toward the horizon; rust-stained Quonset huts and oil tanks; tires abandoned against a sagging fence. Photographed with an old Polaroid in black and white with a hint of sepia, these hazy, cunningly artless snapshots capture terrain that feels nearly vacant but suffused with meaning. Smith’s writings are similarly shaped by Texan vistas, whether in an essay on the geology of the plains, which were the bottoms of ancient seas before they became highways for herds and people, or in a plaintive love song that gives the book its name: “And the stars they are falling from your eyes / And my love, my love was on the rise / And I am in between you and some horizon line / Underneath the western skies.” Smith’s pen is as good as his camera at evoking the gritty physicality of the Lone Star State and opening it up to human energy and emotion, as in his entrancing poem “Necklace”: “Just after the first gas station coming into town, / I see abandoned oil rigs, houses with dirt and cactus front yards, / …. / A dual cab Ford truck screams / Up behind me and passes. / Two teenage white kids in the front smoke / And nod their heads to the bass crunch / Of some guy singing about life in Newark or L.A.” The result is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.

A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.

Pub Date: March 9, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-947297-42-5

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Dexterity

Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022

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A WEALTH OF PIGEONS

A CARTOON COLLECTION

A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.

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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

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ORDINARY NOTES

An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.

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A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.

Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.

An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.

Pub Date: April 25, 2023

ISBN: 9780374604486

Page Count: 392

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023

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