A harrowing and ultimately inspiring set of poems.
Goldstein’s debut poetry collection addresses the sexual abuse of a child by a family member and the difficult process of healing.
In these works—many of which were previously published in the poetry journals The Laurel Review, Rust + Moth, and others—a young boy is sexually victimized by his older brother and goes through various stages of dealing with the trauma as an adult. In one poem, the speaker expresses anger at his parents for their eventual reaction to the abuse, which continued for more than two years: “Why can’t you see I crack & cry & break & bleed? / I am the egg. He is the fox” (“Fragile”). He also deals with internalized feelings of blame and shame (“Growth”), expresses a feeling of disconnection from his Jewish faith in “Wandering In Search of Truth” (“Where was Your parting of the sea / while I was being torn apart?”), and tells of seeking help in therapy (“This Is My Story”). Readers may find these emotional works about trauma and its aftermath to be difficult to read, but throughout this collection, the poet skillfully keeps the poems short, which makes them easier to process while also giving them a feeling of forward momentum. Often, at a poem’s conclusion, readers will have the feeling that an insight has prepared the speaker for a new phase of a healing journey; in short, the works very often give the reader hope of better things ahead for the speaker. By closing his collection with poems with phrases such as, “We are the testaments to the fact that gates can rust & not break. / …. / Hollowed-out hearts can be refilled, remade, renewed” (“We Are the Flowers in That Good Earth”) and “The wind blows & I am unafraid” (“The Aftertaste of the Wind”), Goldstein leaves readers on an optimistic note and with the feeling that daunting obstacles can be overcome.
A harrowing and ultimately inspiring set of poems.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-945233-14-2
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Stillhouse Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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