A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.
An intimate collection of poems traces a painful journey from trauma to healing to love.
In the Q&A section at the end of this volume, Asherah reveals that the preceding cycle of poems was written in response to a sexual assault that triggered memories of childhood trauma. The resulting poetry eschews graphic depictions of harrowing events in favor of gentle exploration of the resulting sadness, grief, and mistrust that the speaker experienced. “What if you are only ever to be yourself in pieces?” is the question that launches her path toward recovery. This journey is divided into four sections, each composed of short, mostly untitled poems. “The Shattering” confronts “The broken pieces / Scraping at my open heart.” This section also addresses methods of survival: “And I can deal with individual losses, / I learned to never put all my weight on one leg.” “The Healing” similarly focuses on the symbiosis of damage and recovery: “Sometimes the heaviness is there / To keep you from floating a w a y.” One of the few titled works, “A Woman’s Bones Are of the Earth,” effectively grounds the entire collection in women’s lived experience: “If we did not learn how to tend to wounds / We would never have been able to survive.” The third section, “Light Shines Through,” is a fierce affirmation of life, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ve broken into my version of a masterpiece,” and describes other people as “an explosion of renewable fuel.” The last section, “Loving,” is a celebration of the heady and excruciating passions of a newfound romantic love. In showing how her speaker was profoundly moved by a relationship with another woman, Asherah is both an articulate romantic (“No one had ever held such curiosity / For the small ponderings in my head”) and a skillful dissector of feelings: “I don’t even know if it’s her I want, / Or just the feelings she brought out in me.” It’s the poet’s refusal to simplify the contradictory web of human existence that gives this book its power.
A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.Pub Date: March 14, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9851871-0-6
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Woven Ember Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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