An elegantly chaotic collection of Space Age verses.
Christain makes meaning from the fragments of dystopia in her second poetry collection.
“Never model a love on the extinction of a species,” cautions one speaker at the end of a poem late in this collection, which finds its vernacular in a world collapsing in a cloud of technology, religion, pop culture, and astrophysics. The poems discover metaphors for love in the imagery of SF, as in the inaugural piece, “Heaven Is a Soundstage Meant To Make Drugged Soldiers More Fearless”: “That’s mine, I scream as a red lever appears under my armpit, and she knows to pull it. / I’d like to think that means my cloned body on another planet actually hooked up with her.” Alienation and queer longing seek articulation in wide-ranging references to cartoons, conspiracy theories, hip-hop, biblical eschatology, cinema, and the occult. The isolation of outer space (and art about this emptiness) reappears again and again, as when Christain invokes the frozen body of an Earth-destroying comet: “Someone could share my same center of mass now without pretensions, but I’m misting out chemicals to hide myself so I won’t have to kill anyone.” Elsewhere, the poet contemplates the iconoclasm of new technology with gleeful disdain: “Though I destroyed the Buddhist ruins, / the 3D light projection replacement / was going to create many jobs, but no one else saw it that way.” Like the points of light that revivify a dead performer in this verse, Christain’s poems find organic life in the clips and blips of the digital present.
Throughout this book, the poet’s works have an unpredictable energy, marrying hyperspecific language with surprising leaps in image and tone. There are misheard lyrics, erasures made from news stories, extensive footnotes, and well-deployed (and often obscure) epigraphs. She’s frequently funny, but the phantasmagoria works better when the underlying emotions are sincere, as here, where the vacuum of space is the void between human bodies: “She said our sun entered into it, its plasma crossing with Saturn’s plasma….The electric discharge became a ladder to Earth, and this, she had to press into me, has everything to do with us now, and how no baby is ever a mistake.” At another point, the now-ancient technology of an instant messenger bridges the same void: “When I was in the tenth grade, / an older woman in a chat room asked, / What do you want to do? / and I wrote Just hold you.” Other standouts in this collection include “Retrieval Structure” (“If you were trying not to stumble into anything too sharp…how did you?”), “Coral Castle: The Tent of Meaning,” “Music Used Against the Enemy,” and “I Need You To Make Me My Own Dinosaur, But It Must Have Feathers,” which yields the quote about extinction noted above. (Needless to say, Christain clearly enjoys wordy titles.) Although these works do not give up their meanings easily, they are messy and intricate in a way that draws the reader deep inside.
An elegantly chaotic collection of Space Age verses.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73582-364-5
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Headmistress Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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