An exceptional poetic trip through an author’s life, loves and intellect.
A remarkable life in verse.
Schwab has had a full life to look back on and transmute into poetry. His book ranges over several subjects, from finding love and growing old, to giraffes and Oscar Wilde. His story begins in high school and spans through his time in the U.S. Navy, in academia and beyond, and touches upon themes that speak to both common and unusual experiences. The poems cover many different periods in his life, even touching on his 60th and 89th birthdays. Schwab’s perspective on American gay life is one that’s increasingly rare—he didn’t come out until he was 26 and didn’t have a relationship until he was 38. The author came of age in a gay culture before the age of AIDS and before meaningful civil rights advances. This experience colored his friendships and love affairs, as well as his poetry. Over the course of the book, he outlines relationships that range from one-night stands to long partnerships, always with a keen eye and a ready sense of humor. There’s more in the book than romance, however; Schwab writes about old friends, world events and historical figures as well. A series of poems on Wilde is particularly tender and showcases Schwab’s affection as well as the Irish author’s art: “No pioneer or fighter for the cause / Directly, à la Ulrichs, Hirschfeld, Ives, / His paradoxes were the subtle knives / He wielded in his battle with the laws.” Although Schwab writes more directly on social themes, his poetry wields words and imagery in a way that can be cutting but always demonstrates his deeply held beliefs. Readers who enjoy autobiographical portraits will have plenty to linger over, as will those particularly interested in the lives of gay men. Those who love poetry for its own sake will also find themselves charmed by this collection, which is frank and, as Schwab says of Liberace after death, “stark naked as uncovered piano strings.”
An exceptional poetic trip through an author’s life, loves and intellect.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496904867
Page Count: 192
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A noteworthy exploration of a parent’s grief.
Through poems and vignettes, Brenner’s moving debut memoir commemorates her son’s death.
Brenner began writing poetry in earnest the night 6-year-old Riley died of an arteriovenous malformation brain hemorrhage. “The pain had to go somewhere,” she recalls. Instead of crying, she crafted poems. These free verse selections, mostly written in complete sentences, rely on alliteration, assonance and striking imagery rather than straight rhyme for impact. Perspective morphs subtly, starting in the third person and moving into a more intimate first-person present, with occasional outbursts of second-person address to Riley. “The Perfect Latch” tenderly equates breast-feeding with bonding, despite pain and ambivalence: “Nipples raw and cracked, / burning like resentment, / she squeezes her left breast / to achieve the perfect latch.” In “Shifting Sand,” alliteration makes for memorable lines about flux: “grinding the finite grains / against the scarred linoleum.” Several passages are gently morbid: “Funny we called it permanent, / you only had it for a week” (“Your Permanent Tooth”) and “A washing machine outlives a little boy.” Inventive, extended metaphors personify death or mock opinions about God: Here is “Death’s finger pointing, / Eeny, meeny, miny, moe”; and in “God as a Waiter,” one must only “Place the order, / [and] Thou shall receive” another baby. Brenner contrasts the blithe early days of marriage—“We offered ourselves to each other / lightly as happy hour hors d’oeuvres”—with the strain Riley’s death placed on her and her husband, Lee. She also dwells on Riley’s physical remains—clothes under his bed, a rosebush he loved, as well as the organs he donated—and on others’ well-meaning but trite responses to her grief. Just as powerful are the one-page autobiographical vignettes interspersed throughout. Of these, best is “Choices,” in which the vocabulary foreshadows medical crisis: “coffin-shaped room,” “a cracker that clumps like ash on my tongue” and “the doctors file in like pallbearers.” However, the subtitle should indicate that nearly a quarter of the text is prose, and 17 continuous pages of family photos are perhaps excessive.
A noteworthy exploration of a parent’s grief.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692267479
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Silver Birch Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.
In a literary landscape littered with ponderous rhymes and too-confessional verse, it is a joy to come across a strong collection of light poetry, works that flit across the world’s brighter surfaces while only occasionally sneaking beneath to peek at darker depths.
Fontinel-Gibran’s slick, slim new collection is a mostly gratifying sequence of what one might call diversionary poetry that delights even as it defies the genre’s subtle pull toward more doleful themes. The sense that this is a happier verse experiment is confirmed early, in adjacent works entitled “The Blue Law” and “Officially Desserted.” The first is a celebration and origin story of the ice cream sundae. The second is simply an unbroken, page-long list of sweets, from Bananas Foster to Burnt Sugar Marzipan to Coconut Glamour Cake—mouthwatering. Other poems take up or touch upon the joys of gustation, among them “Fringe Benefits,” “The Danes’ Delight” and “Make the Coffee!” Yet Fontinel-Gibran by no means confines herself to culinary themes. “Don’t You Remember; How to Play Flag Football?” sings the joys of gym class: “Even girls play football in gymnasium class; dreaming of wearing one day perhaps an amber football mum on Homecoming night.” “Geoffrey Gopher Would!” playfully laments the rodent tearing up the front yard: “There were just, no way to convey to him, to stop digging up those fucking mounds.” In most of these pieces, Fontinel-Gibran writes in line-less prose poetry, a daring choice, the only drawback being that it sometimes lets the author slip into purple language, as in “The Lonely Number”: “It’s true, by way of separating out from all other organisms, physical objects and realities, the enlightened being grows into a specified, philosophical, regular ‘unit’ on an everyday basis, that ultimately reveals itself through being at peace and in harmony with all other aspects of existence.” This abstraction threatens to fall away into drivel. But there’s more fun than philosophizing in this volume, and it’s well worth the read.
Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496902818
Page Count: 142
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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