A record of a country and people in crisis rendered in fearless, anguishing detail.
Seif-Eldeine’s debut chapbook acts as a vigil for the people of Syria.
Even when embedded, dedicated journalists can’t always fully capture the emotional cost of war and disaster. So, artists, writers, and poets step in to describe their impact for those who live beyond the headlines and to provide perspective to stories that might otherwise remain untold. In this chapbook, Seif-Eldeine chronicles the psychic damage of more than a decade of conflict in Syria, much like a reporter would; he oscillates between being an observer and a participant, conveying the experiences of ordinary Syrian citizens under violent oppression and intermingling them with accounts from first-person speakers who grapple with sacrifice and the sheer emotional weight of survival. In these works, war destroys even the most mundane objects and tasks. Prayer rugs become Kevlar vests in the poem “What Prayer Rugs Collect”; nuptials transpire in camps of those on the run from destruction (“Refugee Wedding”), and even the smallest pleasures vanish from everyday lives (“Who Wants French Cigarettes in Syria?”). Over the course of this collection, Seif-Eldeine is careful not to simply damn the perpetrators of violence, aside from president and dictator Bashar al-Assad. He considers what motivates people’s support for al-Assad in “Talking Politics in Syria,” and he makes no value judgments about human losses on both sides; in his works, every soldier is a “wild / mouthed child of a war” (“The First Kill”). He records and honors the experiences of farmers, housewives, the highly educated, soldiers, and foreign-born nationals alike.
It’s the way the poet conveys these stories and alludes to his own personal burdens that’s so arresting and strikes so deeply. The poems convey grief without pity and pomp; the entanglement of sorrow and fury may catch readers off guard in lines such as “the pines we chop down / for Christmas: green and red. / Did the triage doctor mark me / green, or red like the sea?” (“The Soldier’s Last Thoughts”) and “On days I am King, I give up / my lamb to my children. / Their stomachs are as empty / as a gun that has run out of clips” (“King or Queen for a Day”). In his Syria, neither death nor life has any dignity; bodies full of bullets expel excrement when retrieved, marriages buckle into isolation and abuse, and children are sold to pay for food and shelter. Concrete details are interspersed among lyrical accounts of such things as an offhandedly expressed death toll, al-Assad’s experience with dentistry (depicted as a metaphor for his tyranny), and the growth of refugee camps in neighboring countries. But Seif-Eldeine is most harrowing when he uses small moments and details to convey the true scale of suffering in an ongoing conflict, as when a woman paints in a blurry Van Gogh–like style because she lost her glasses in a bombing, or a farmer harvesting his crops remarks on his “watermelons larger than decapitated heads.”
A record of a country and people in crisis rendered in fearless, anguishing detail.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2023
ISBN: 9798375000510
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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