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
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
