A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.
Burrell presents a deeply personal anthology of poetry.
The author explores many themes in this evocative poetry collection, including family, loss, and social issues like mass shootings and Covid-19. Burrell’s strongest pieces touch on human connection and examine how people reconcile their past with their present, as illustrated by the piece “Midlife”: “Everything’s falling fast / like four decades of dominoes lined up / as something shaped like my life.” Much of the work is moving, like “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky,” which takes the form of a news interview mash-up following the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Burrell’s writing is vividly descriptive in its scene-setting, painting a clear and redolent picture of both the physical surroundings and the emotions contained in the verses, as in “Do Not Drive Into Smoke”: “That house had a cellar, / lightless, dingy, that smelled like pond mud, / like cigarette butts floating in a bucket / of rainwater.” Readers can feel the grief of the speaker in “Unable To Sing.” One of the standout pieces is “Exact Change Pantoum,” another example of the speaker contemplating one’s life and choices: “I followed loss through the forest and crossed fields… / …I had my head / in night clouds, and behind them years, dulled stars, / like spit wads on a blackboard! I wasted all my breath / trying not to lose it….” Burrell’s pieces are sometimes more experimental in their composition, like the aforementioned “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky” as well as “Blind Spots Hide Motorcycles Look Twice: A Matching Quiz,” in which readers are tasked with matching up opposing statements that are poignant in any configuration they choose.
A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781958094433
Page Count: 74
Publisher: Eastover Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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