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 On another occasion, the poet takes aim at Hollywood “as out-of-date / an institution as slavery.”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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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