A playful, eye-popping collection of poems.
A volume of visual poetry offers experiments with image and form.
Poetry is primarily a text medium, but it doesn’t have to be. “I wanted to do poetry that was inspired by other forms of literature and written in a manner where it could be seen as a piece of artwork as well,” writes Robles in her introduction. What follows are 82 pieces that do just that, making use of three visually striking poetic forms. Calligrams are poems written to take the shape of objects. “Playtime” is formatted to look like a kite, its lines enjambed into a diamond outline: “I / couldn’t / get mine / up. No matter / how hard I / pulled and tugged / on it.” Redactive poems, which feature erasures, highlight certain words or letters in found texts. For example, “The writing” is culled from a page of the novel A Wedding in Decemberby Anita Shreve: “a secret / story / lingered / impressing / i / n / to / her memory / the man / produced / her / anxiety / trailing / whiffs of / distance / between them.” There are also pieces that the author calls photographs, in which poems are written on or near objects and then shot. “Pretty Tiring” is printed on a hair comb: “You want me looking beautiful. As long as I see you before I head out. You won’t let me leave like I just got up after rolling in bed all disheveled.” Robles’ poems are free verse, their meanings related closely to their forms, as in “Deserted,” a calligram in the shape of a cupcake that tells the story of a waitress experiencing sexual harassment from a customer. The poems are plainspoken and rarely remarkable as pure text, though the author displays an economy of language and has an ear for the rhythms of normal speech. The most arresting pieces are the photographs, which feel more like contemporary art pieces combining photography, sculpture, and poetry. They are eye-catching in a pop-art way. “Bonding” is presented on the back of a glue bottle, while “Best Glove” is written on a pair of rubber gloves. The book is an undeniably fun one, and in the best pieces, the words and images come together to be more than the sum of their parts.
A playful, eye-popping collection of poems.Pub Date: April 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64314-518-1
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Authors Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.
The reality of climate change serves as the pervasive context for this terrific thriller set on a remote island between Australia and Antarctica.
Four family members and one stranger are trapped on an island with no means of communication—what could go wrong? The setup may sound like a mix of Agatha Christie and The Swiss Family Robinson, but Australian author McConaghy is not aiming for a cozy read. Shearwater Island—loosely based on Macquarie Island, a World Heritage Site—is a research station where scientists have been studying environmental change. For eight years, widowed Dominic Salt has been the island’s caretaker, raising his three children in a paradise of abundant wildlife. But Shearwater is receding under rising seas and will soon disappear. The researchers have recently departed by ship, and in seven weeks a second ship will pick up Dominic and his kids. Meanwhile, they are packing up the seed vault built by the United Nations in case the world eventually needs “to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us.” One day a woman, Rowan, washes ashore unconscious but alive after a storm destroys the small boat on which she was traveling. Why she’s come anywhere near Shearwater is a mystery to Dominic; why the family is alone there is a mystery to her. While Rowan slowly recovers, Dominic’s kids, especially 9-year-old Orly—who never knew his mother—become increasingly attached, and Rowan and Dominic fight their growing mutual attraction. But as dark secrets come to light—along with buried bodies—mutual suspicions also grow. The five characters’ internal narratives reveal private fears, guilts, and hopes, but their difficulty communicating, especially to those they love, puts everyone in peril. While McConaghy keeps readers guessing which suspicions are valid, which are paranoia, and who is culpable for doing what in the face of calamity, the most critical battle turns out to be personal despair versus perseverance. McConaghy writes about both nature and human frailty with eloquent generosity.
Readers won’t want to leave behind the imagined world of pain and beauty that McConaghy has conjured.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250827951
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.
A philosophical discourse inside an addiction narrative, all wrapped up in a quest novel.
Poet Akbar's debut in fiction features Cyrus Shams, a child of the Midwest and of the Middle East. When Cyrus was an infant, his mother, Roya, a passenger on a domestic flight in Iran, was killed by a mistakenly fired U.S. missile. His father, Ali, who after Roya died moved with Cyrus to small-town Indiana and worked at a poultry factory farm, has also died. Cyrus disappeared for a time into alcoholism and drugs. Now on the cusp of 30, newly sober but still feeling stuck in his college town, Cyrus becomes obsessed with making his life matter, and he conceives of a grand poetic project, The Book of Martyrs (at the completion of which, it seems, he may commit suicide). By chance, he discovers online a terminally ill Iranian American artist, Orkideh, who has decided to live out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum, having candid tête-à-têtes with the visitors who line up to see her, and Cyrus—accompanied by Zee, his friend and lover, who's understandably a bit alarmed by all this—embarks on a quest to visit and consult with and learn from her. The novel is talky, ambitious, allusive, deeply meditative, and especially good in its exploration of Cyrus as not being between ethnic or national identities but inescapably, radically both Persian and American. It succeeds so well on its own terms that the novel's occasional flaws—big coincidences, forays into other narrators that sometimes fall flat, dream-narratives, occasional small grandiosities—don't mar the experience in any significant way.
Imperfect, yes, but intense, original, and smart.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593537619
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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