A large and uneven collection of poems chronicling ill-fated encounters.
In this poetry collection, Bioku probes the pressure points where disparate forces collide.
There is seemingly no topic the author doesn’t broach in this broad new collection of poems. The book is divided into sections (“Grounded in the Elements,” “Grounded in Society,” “Grounded in Self,” “Grounded in Humanity,”) that are further subdivided into clusters revolving around the concepts of fire or water, familial connections or city life, “body inhibitions,” or “economic restorations.” The elemental poems deal largely with the natural world, particularly as it grows increasingly blighted by pollution and climate change. The imagery of “Apocalypse” is reminiscent of the wildfires California has suffered in recent years: “The chimney is filled with smoke. / From the mountain side, we can see the desolated fire. / Startled goats, leopards, and sheep run away feeling petrified.” Not every poem is quite so dire; in “Mojave,” a trip to see the Joshua trees in winter leads to a moment of profound understanding: “We watched as the snow fell gracefully onto the broccoli-shaped florets. / Here in the hidden valley, everything becomes known.” Bioku evinces a fascination with the injection of alien material into preexisting systems, as in “Fluticasone Lungs,” an ode to the allergy-relieving nasal spray: “My organ seeks to float on inorganic compounds. / Air-filled alveoli, oxygen is needed. / Windpipes knocked down; cilia can’t filter this one out. / The walls of the trachea are quickly closing in on me.” In “The Agreement,” foreign investment is the interloper, wreaking havoc on developing economies: “Host countries are left to fend for themselves. / They lack the resources to grow and develop. / Forceful control of both people and land. / Many are left feeling exposed and exploited.” Throughout the work, Bioku asks, again and again, what these intrusions mean for the intruded-upon and the intruder.
The book is on the longer side for a poetry volume. The number and neatness of the poems—each has a fairly digestible concept or metaphor that Bioku pursues for about a dozen lines—give readers the sense that they were written quickly, and one wishes the poet had been willing to weed out the weaker ones. The more engaging offerings are specific in their language, especially those that find the speaker’s emotion mirrored in a natural world. “Whales create splashes by the harbor,” reads “Wingspan,” “But the Albatross birds are still suffering. / Plastic consumes their intestines; they struggle to feed their offspring. / There’s not enough zooplankton for this keystone species. / They live and breathe water; it’s all that they know.” Such lines, while sometimes endearingly clunky, work better than the wooden language in verses like “They say work hard and play harder, but I’m not fond of games. / Disposable income unanchored in the industrialized system” (“Grinds and Flows”). Part of this approach may be that Bioku thrills in the precision of scientific language while struggling to locate the same liveliness in humans and their relationships to each other. Even so, readers may be curious to see how her style develops over future collections.
A large and uneven collection of poems chronicling ill-fated encounters.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781665743129
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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