A brave and emotional poetic effort, hampered by uneven presentation.
Carranza offers a poetry collection about personal growth that honors a beloved pet and companion.
The author opens this compilation with a series of dedications to her family, readers, doctors, mentors, teachers, healers, and, most of all, to her late Schnauzer, Sunny. Carranza’s journey is one of growth and healing from a point of deep trauma, and she relates how Sunny was an important source of support for her, up until his death in 2023. Some of the most meaningful times they spent together were on the beach in Port Aransas, Texas. As such, the first half of Carranza’s collection focuses on the sea. After opening with an elegy to Sunny, the “Echoes of the Ocean” section frequently uses dolphins as a symbol of wisdom, joy, and love. While other sea creatures do feature in the text—as in “Octopus” and “A Whale’s Song of Sorrow”— Carranza returns to dolphins as a subject repeatedly. In “Dolphin Love Pod,” a crew of dolphins are described protecting and loving each other in a celebration of family; in “Whispers of the Past,” the speaker looks back on her youth and her nostalgia-drenched memories of watching dolphins play. A series of the author’s paintings bridge these early poems and “Rising Tides, Rising Spirit,” a more directly personal section that speaks to the healing power of love and transformation. Carranza is unafraid to approach difficult themes, from miscarriage in “A Modern-Day Fairytale” to adverse childhood experiences in “Unbroken Spirit” and “Rising Above,” among others. The collection closes with “Golden Wings,” a poem about rising from “ashes of tragedy” and embracing newfound strength.
Carranza’s poetry clearly comes from an incredibly personal and heartfelt place. The topic of love is a thread woven throughout the book, and it allows the speakers to grant forgiveness and preserve their spirit as they fight to overcome past struggles. The paintings and photographs that appear throughout also provide insight into the poet herself. Particularly powerful lines include “I realized that I am not the sum of my mother’s fears” in “The Weight of Legacy” and ”I was free, / Released to loved ones, clinging to deity” in “The Queen of Angels.” Readers may wish, though, that the first half of the collection were better connected to the second. Although there are some shared themes, the focus on dolphins and the sea more generally do little to prepare the reader for the tonal shift in the second half. The first part of the book also struggles to adequately portray the journey of transformation in the rest of the collection. With more curation, the overriding themes of “Echoes of the Ocean” and “Rising Tides, Rising Spirit” might have resonated more clearly. More experimentation with poetic form might also have added more nuance. The vast majority of the works here use a similar, rigid poetic structure. Although such constraints can serve as an aid in shaping a collection, more variety might have offers a chance to explore new perspectives.
A brave and emotional poetic effort, hampered by uneven presentation.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9781953258090
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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