A moving, defiant poetic exposé of world injustice.
Black feminist poet and educator Juanita rails against those who threaten the “inviolable right to live” in this collection.
“Some time after my youthful and equally fervent participation in the Black Panther Party, I became a Nichiren Soka Gakkai Buddhist,” remarks Juanita in her preface to this new collection. The poet goes on to explain how the second president of Soka Gakkai International, Josei Toda, denounced people who would employ nuclear weaponry as “ ‘devils’ in the Buddhist sense of ‘robbers of life.’ ” Throughout this book, Juanita calls out the “evils of imperialism,” including nuclear aggression, equating it with the destructive movie monster Godzilla. The opening work even draws on a plot summary of the original 1954 film: “American nuclear weapons testing has created a seemingly unstoppable, dinosaur-like beast”; in “return of godzilla,” the concept of the creature is used to draw attention to other monstrous aspects of humankind: “unfaltering racism / uglier than godzilla’s scales.” On another occasion, the poet takes aim at Hollywood “as out-of-date / an institution as slavery.” Other poems touch on figures from popular culture; one provocatively juxtaposes Dave Chappelle and Malcolm X, and in “lizzo fights godzilla,” the titular singer and flautist confronts “amerikkka the beautiful,” with the speaker declaring “we is 100% behind you baby girl / behind your superb black ass...let us worship lizzo / that’s right—bow down.” Toward the close of the collection, the poet includes “The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem,” an 8-page work that addresses gun control in America.
Over the course of this compilation, Juanita writes gloriously unrestrained poetry that always packs a punch. For instance, a poem titled “old black woman” rapidly develops into an unsettling portrait of racial oppression: “her favorite show was lassie / said white people love their dogs so much / because it was bred in them / to treat blacks like beasts / of burden during slavery.” Meticulously placed line breaks further intensify this poem’s impact. Elsewhere, “swimming towards godzilla, swimming from godzilla” deftly pinpoints the horror, sadness, and futility of the refugee crisis: “in the great Mediterranean / their arms paddle to freedom / the women and babies scream and sink / into eternity / a few feet from the raft.” Such jarring imagery compels readers to face issues of social injustice head-on. Juanita’s poetry can also be wryly amusing, as in a poem that points out the absurdity of people being defined by their skin color: “ ‘I’m crazy about the new guy. What a pumpkin.’ / ‘Are you sure he’s not a yam? Or even a sweet potato?’ ” Throughout, her poems aim to shake readers up and make them rethink issues from new angles, as in the aforementioned “The Gun as Ultimate Performance Poem,” in which the speaker declares, “I don’t want gun control. I want police who are unarmed, peace officers.” Readers will find this to be incisive writing that aims to be a powerful tool for positive change.
A moving, defiant poetic exposé of world injustice.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9781732609808
Page Count: 90
Publisher: EquiDistance Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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