A compellingly poetic call for awareness, empathy, and action around racism.
Historical injustice, personal trauma, cultural resilience, and more are covered in Millwood’s book of poems.
“Forcefully Taken,” the fiery opener, describes the harrowing experience of violation and “the weight of oppression, its jealousy and lust.” The speaker endures physical and emotional pain, likening the body to a “diamond under pressure.” “Guineamen” reflects on the brutal history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The poet juxtaposes joyful memories of freedom, when “Freewill crowned each step of life— / life was bright as the day once,” with the horrors of enslavement, when “Harvested like maize, / resisting bodies lay lifeless in heaps.” Body language, silence, and the power of words factor heavily into Millwood’s work. In “Kindness for Weakness?” the speaker makes an outward show of agreeability but resents the need to be nice, warning “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness, / nor my silence for acceptance / Within me, lurks the power to pull down your walls of lies / and I will repay the past with modern vengeance.” In a critique of performative allyship, in “Do Not” Millwood writes, “Do not pretend to understand, / when you are part of the problem / by being silent, by downplaying, / by casually dipping your feet in torrid waters.” “Hidden in Plain Sight” is a poetic manifesto that speaks to Black people’s contributions that are often deliberately obscured and praises their resilience: “I am the roots that run through your veins. / I am the ancestors you venerate. / I am the blueprint of your DNA. / I am the face you seek to hide.”
Millwood excels at conveying deep emotional experiences through vivid and evocative imagery. She describes “Great welts cascaded upon my temple, / Tattooing trees strong and ample, / With branches great and wide. Far-reaching” (in “To Never Forget”) and in “Rage” compares Black pain to a festering wound, “Oozing with yellow pus. / Injuries torn open / leaving rotting infection / down to the marrow / of the bone.” Her similes are equally strong, from clothes “discarded like empty wrappers” to how “your entrance is like a cool zephyr.” Millwood’s voice is direct and unapologetic, and she forces readers to confront their own perceptions and misconceptions around Blackness. While the book contains ample rage, it also shows encouragement and pride, as in “Black Gold,” when the poet asserts, “We are Jewels in human form, great beings to behold. / Calm as a summer’s day or as violent as a winter’s storm. / Walking the earth with majesty. / All who see them, bow in awestruck captivity.” Millwood also celebrates Black identities, proclaiming, “My Black is the type of black that brings forth life. / My Black breeds abundance in lack. / My Black is the type of black that calls men to stand as kings. / My Black rocks Earth and makes Heavens shake.” On the downside, the content can get quite gruesome and may be hard for some readers to stomach, like this recounting of a crime in “Little White Lies”: “One night, 2 Men, 1 Child, / Over days, beaten and tortured. / Smashing to a pulp / The child of a proud mother.”
A compellingly poetic call for awareness, empathy, and action around racism.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781399921206
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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 ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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