A slender collection of essays explores the role of race in poetry and life.
A writer of South Asian descent wonders how to live—and write—in a country that both “values and devalues” him.
Poet Bolina explores race and other topics in 10 personal essays rooted in his experience of growing up as the only child of Sikh Punjabi immigrants in the Chicago area. His perspective tends to be stereoscopic, especially in his first essay, “Empathy for the Devil,” which deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden: “When I hear that he’s dead, I don’t feel anything resembling sorrow, but watching the young men in trees outside the White House waving flags and chanting USA! USA! I don’t feel any kind of pride either. Both sides of the conflict seem barbaric. They killed one of them. Neither side includes me.” Bolina’s gift for seeing diverse viewpoints resurfaces in later essays. In “Writing Like a White Guy,” he considers how to write truthfully when a privileged education has left him with “only the parlance of whiteness to express my brownness.” In “White Wedding,” he reflects on his marriage to a white woman, on brown-white romances in the media, and on Americans’ tendency to see pop stars of color as a “racial vanguard.” “As much as any vanguard represents progress,” writes the author, “these trailblazers aren’t evidence of a nation’s sudden embrace of diversity so much as evidence of the majority’s self-congratulatory tolerance of it.” Most of the essays unfold as a series of vignettes or scenes, some so brief that they short-circuit the development of promising ideas. Along with other limits, that underdevelopment makes the book a minor collection in this arena. However, the author shows flashes of promise on which to build in the future, and given that many of the pieces deal with the intersection of race and writing, the book will interest creative writing students and programs.
A slender collection of essays explores the role of race in poetry and life.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944211-86-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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