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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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