A collection that offers a captivating mosaic of a poet’s interior life.
A volume of poetry focuses on dreams, memories, and thought experiments.
In this collection, Salinas explores both himself—a Hispanic man, a Texas poet, a Roman Catholic, a wordsmith—and society. Though the author has coined the term “Hispanic sonnet,” explaining that it’s “a 15-line, free-verse poem with a separated last line as its own stanza,” he doesn’t limit himself to this invented form. Dreams are a central theme, often starring literary icons like Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez. In one such dream, the speaker erroneously compliments his date, Harper Lee, on To Kill a Bald Eagle: “Harper Lee snorted / And her Blizzard dribbled out her nose as though / She’d sneezed.” The writing life is a recurring theme: “I dreamt I had a homework assignment / Due yesterday, today, tomorrow, the day / After & each day forever—it was called / Being A Writer.” In “Audacity,” Salinas fantasizes about “obliterating you with ruthless poetry.” Contemplating life vis-a-vis the beloved denim jacket his grandfather left him, the poet observes that “many things don’t fit anymore.” At a Barnes & Noble cafe, he critiques a high schooler reading Foucault. Pop-culture touchstones are also scattered throughout. Kurt Cobain and Goethe mingle in one poem; Kanye West and Indiana Jones appear in another. Salinas uses vivid and inventive imagery, from a “pimpled ceiling as constellation” to “sherbet skies” and the “velvet tongue of our brutal fathers.” He deftly contemplates contradictions: “The most alive person I know / Is dead” and the way his “brown-skinned childhood hero— / My godfather—glorified Trump’s MAGA-red crusade.” He also injects subtle humor in lines like “A lover once asked: / ‘How do you write / Beautifully?’ / I replied: / ‘Be born ugly.’” Many of the poems read like fever dreams: “As I lay dying / With spiders in my mind / The plumpest calls himself / William Faulkner.” But some of the poetic experiments fall flat, including “A little help from my friends,” which is a compilation of random comments on unrelated topics.
A collection that offers a captivating mosaic of a poet’s interior life.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781953447227
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Flowersong Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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