An incisive, expert-level analysis of financial crime in free verse.
Akinyemi explores risk, corruption, and accountability in this book, which blends financial crime investigation, sociopolitical commentary, and poetry.
In this unusual collection, Akinyemi opens with a refrain of “Know Your Customer,” a poem that weaves personal identity (e.g., a mother’s maiden name) with financial industry regulatory standards, such as “identify and verify.” In “Holes,” the speaker looks for red flags indicating money laundering. These illicit funds seek shelter and erasure of their origins. Next, the speaker must untangle the “ownership chain” to reveal the person benefitting from unlawful transactions. “Risk Appetite” considers variable risk tolerance thresholds; at its extreme, risk tolerance “hits imaginary roofs / and catapults into sinking sands.” The work notes that mitigating risk is crucial for companies, lest they face losing their reputations or going broke paying regulatory fines. Sanctions are mocked as ineffective, “a comedy show.” In “Slave of the Tax Master,” the speaker calls out the hypocrisy of a system that taxes everyday people “to the bones” while policymakers take advantage of offshore tax havens. Akinyemi likens “dirty money” to a river that crosses borders before merging with “clean money.” The poet concludes with “Compliance Poet,” which reflects on the convergence of his professional paths as an anti-money laundering specialist and author. Akinyemi’s unconventional, intriguing collection combines technical subject matter with poetic style in lines like, “Come to this compliance table cleaner / than sparkling water. / We are tilling the soil / for suspicious activity.” Most poems also include helpful footnotes. However, industry-specific acronyms (FATF, AML, and CFT) and financial regulation lingo—for example, “The three lines of defence (or 3LOD) model is an accepted regulated framework designed to facilitate an effective risk management system”—may lose readers.
An incisive, expert-level analysis of financial crime in free verse.Pub Date: June 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781913636449
Page Count: 84
Publisher: The Roaring Lion Newcastle
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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