A rousing triptych of poetry as a weapon against apathy, ignorance, and inaction.
A poet and activist who founded the nonprofit organization Poetic People Power puts poetry performance on the page in this collection of shows.
For Bracco, poetry is how people come to understand the stakes of what’s happening in the world around them. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the organization she founded, she presents transcriptions of three of its collaborative spoken-word shows, grounded in three great threats to society: climate change, misogyny, and human rights abuses. In an introduction, she shares her own journey as an artist in 1990s New York City, during which her work “didn’t fit neatly into literary or slam poetry,” but she was determined to continue creating. The result was an organization that, like poetry, eludes easy definition. These three works combine poetics, research, history, activism, and theatrical elements; two were produced on Zoom due to pandemic-related precautions. Each includes a collective opening scene with commissioned poets each writing their own works (sometimes collaboratively) on the show’s themes. While not all the poems are compulsively rereadable without the energy of performance, Bracco and her collaborators largely present works whose urgency translates well to the page. Bracco’s scene from “While We Were Sleeping,” about human trafficking, is a good example: “And I re-learn a truth that I already know: / women are always vulnerable. / And the line between safety and danger is so thin / like the slice of the knife mark he left on her neck, / but the damage is longlasting / like the crush of broken bones that ache / for years after.” A poem by Karla Jackson-Brewer from the show “Can You Hear Me Now?” about her enslaved ancestors is similarly powerful: “She is compelled, / Driven by an urge / So primal and transgressive. / SHE WILL RISK / Slave patrols and whip / To find it.” Art and artists sound alarms on social issues that governments either don’t see or ignore, and this book shows how they might continue to make noise to help change the world.
A rousing triptych of poetry as a weapon against apathy, ignorance, and inaction.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781960329233
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.
A New Jersey senator’s moral manifesto.
Booker situates his narrative in the wake of his 2025 record-breaking 25-hour stand on the Senate floor, an act of physical endurance and moral insistence that serves as its animating example. Though not framed as memoir, the episode implicitly positions Booker himself as a model of the virtues he argues are essential to democratic life. Organized around 10 qualities, including agency, vulnerability, truth, perseverance, and grace, the book advances a clear thesis. “In this book, I argue that many Americans who came before us, and many among us today, have consistently proven that virtues are practical: They expand our power, deepen our sense of belonging, and equip us to endure and ultimately prevail.” Booker illustrates this claim through figures such as the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, whose willingness to endure sacrifice for principle anchors the book’s moral lineage, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose composure under public scrutiny is presented as an example of dignity as civic strength. These portraits reinforce Booker’s belief that character, sustained over time, can shape public life, even when political outcomes remain uncertain or incomplete. He supplements these examples with personal stories drawn from family, faith, and community, delivered with emotional conviction and a tone that remains affirming and carefully calibrated. Much of the narrative reads like an expansive commencement address, earnest and reassuring, offering moral affirmation at moments when readers might reasonably expect sharper confrontation. That rhetorical choice ultimately defines the book’s limits. Booker acknowledges political conflict and compromise, but rarely examines them in depth, and while urging leaders to take moral risks, he avoids sustained reflection on how some of his own political decisions have tested the virtues he promotes. The result is a principled but self-conscious work that affirms shared values while offering little guidance for navigating power and accountability.
A hopeful civic sermon favoring inspiration over concrete prescriptions.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781250436733
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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
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