A vivid, impressive collection by a dynamic poet.
A chapbook of poetry focuses on a kaleidoscope of memories, challenges, and experiences.
Morris waxes poetic about small moments with power, grace, and beauty in this collection. “Slight” hints at a departure “on a March morning when you whooshed / right out of my life, backspace, backspace, / backspace.” She considers human nature in “Side by Side,” concluding, “Maybe love is mostly assembly, bit by bit.” The titular poem details a woman’s painstaking recovery from pneumonia, which seems to incite an existential crisis. A mother lingers over coffee and the newspaper, gossiping about boyfriends in “Another one in the pen.” “Lean” is a writer’s manifesto in which the speaker directly addresses poetry and declares: “I’ve got to be startled out of / my indifference, stowed here in my office chair. / A poem has got to make me stand up or else.” A 5-year-old boy injured during a Superman fantasy gone awry is the subject of “Early Impact.” “Paris, 1988” juxtaposes the author’s experience in the City of Light with her veteran father’s memories of leaving that country in the back of an Army truck after liberation. Morris writes of “waiting for donkey work to end” and wondering what preceded a soulless office building in “Night Season.” Even quotidian happenings, such as remodeling an extra bedroom or a cat coming home with a dead bird, garner their own poems. No word is wasted in this slim volume. Morris’ poems will hit readers like a punch in the gut—quick, hard, and unforgettable. She stimulates all five senses as she recalls “the swoosh of the heat pump,” “the old clock’s patient beat,” and kitten heels that “rattle like ice.” A kitchen counter becomes an “overturned boat,” while the memory of a beloved’s kisses is “like fresh snow.” Describing a creative writing professor, Morris writes he “smoked in bed and drank on his feet,” and his eyes were “no longer the crystal / lakes that had lapped the edge of childhood dreams.” Even a seemingly silly poem about a “fuzzy lollipop” becomes sly and sensual under the author’s pen.
A vivid, impressive collection by a dynamic poet.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1387600571
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Lulu.com
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
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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