by Adam Piper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2008
Earnest and literal, Piper’s heart is on his sleeve.
In his first volume of poetry, Piper covers a wide swath of emotional and philosophical territory, documenting his thoughts and feelings along the way.
Reading the book’s end passage, a quote from Charles Bukowski, readers immediately understand what they’re getting into: “If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.” Piper’s sporadic and textured imagery (“it’s the insides of your pupils that dilate next to me”) is not the only element that makes this book compelling. With this volume of rhyming poetry, it’s as though the author is operating a telescopic lens, zooming in and out from the sacred to the literal, capturing a range of human emotion and thought. As he explains in a brief introduction, “This book is a representation of what is for the reader to decide. People discern words for the meanings they want for themselves.” Piper asks the abstract “meaning of life and love and loss” questions, then closes in on the three-dimensional world to explore the more dissonant aspects of society and humanity, while criticizing things like television and war. With simple language applied to universal themes, the author is a romantic, creating verse that’s accessible to any reader. Still, the work never strays too far from the specifics of his personal experience and ideas. In “Obstacle,” he writes, “Our ancestors didn’t think about / Corporations / and / Cars / What were their dreams? / Were they as materialistic as ours?” In a piece titled “Throne,” he holds up a mirror before a self-righteous snob, yet ironically (showing the work’s complexity), the accuser’s voice comes off as equally self-righteous: “You act like / You’re better than everyone else / Chances are / You don’t even know yourself.” Who among us will have trouble relating? The readers’ sympathetic feelings will connect them with the meaning of these words and ultimately the poet.
Earnest and literal, Piper’s heart is on his sleeve.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1440414466
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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