A poetry collection about family origins that buries the lede.
Stawowy presents a character-driven collection of poetry.
This book of poems follows a family across several generations. The author begins with a direct address to her ancestors, declaring, “Your stories, hidden gospels, and I, the heretic who decodes them” (“Dear Ancestors”). The book begins with a section on her biological family circa 1924 and 1925. In “Fern: The Expert,” readers meet Harry, a barber married in a shotgun wedding to Bertha (Fern is their “shotgun baby”). Harry’s mistress, Faye, refuses to “throw away good years like dishwater on petunias” (“Faye: I’ll Get What I Want”). George, the husband left behind, drinks from a “brown bag of grief” (“George: Wait a Minute”).The second section of the book features her adoptive family in the years between 1925 and 1960. The speaker lives with “Fred: Counterfeit Father,” sisters Doris and Florence, and a bitter mother named Belle. Doris soon departs for Chicago, and Fred feels left behind by his offspring. The third section of the book follows the “fractured family” from 1960 to 2018. Doris leaves her husband, claiming “I gave him a precious gift. He just doesn’t know it yet” (“Doris: Leaving Him”). Doris suffers from dementia. The final two poems find the poet reconciling her mother’s erroneous family tree with DNA testing, using writing to mend the story. Stawowy excels at making metaphors and similes. She describes “murmuring snails under a milk moon” (“Dear Ancestors”)and the way aging turns a face into “a frail map, antiquated” (“Faye, Age Seventy: Ignored at the Family Party”). The poet also experiments with form: There are poems written in the form of an advice column, one in which the columnist advises a wife worried about her husband’s absence to “guide that donkey back to the barn” (“Bertha: Asking for Advice”).Throughout, the poet adopts the voices of different characters. As the cast grows, it becomes challenging to keep them all straight—or feel deeply invested in their individual narrative arcs. It is not until the epilogue that Stawowy provides the context necessary to understand the poems.
A poetry collection about family origins that buries the lede.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781639803279
Page Count: 57
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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