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COPACABANA AT MIDNIGHT

A seafaring poetry collection that sails smoothly until some short fiction knocks it off course.

A collection offers a buffet of surf-and-turf poetry with a serving of gothic short stories for dessert.

Three distinct streams cascade through this sizable volume of oceanic writings by mariner-turned-writer Brewer. The first features poetry drawn from the primal hunger of the sea and those on it, painting an eerie vision of loss and longing in the tradition of William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe. In one poem, the dark and exotic ocean swallows up time itself, keeping a sailor from his true love and family while bringing age and exhaustion through the hard work. In another piece, a seaworthy man becomes like the land bird he sees “perched upon the mast,” wondering “what could cause him blunder / out above the open sea / so very far from field or tree / which he seeks now desperately.” Interspersed between these offerings are numbered poems set in a world of high fantasy, brimming with goddesses, witches, mermaids, and sorcerers. The appearance of “The Red Witch” harkens back to maritime themes, invoking the 1948 John Wayne film Wake of the Red Witch. The collection ends on a selection of short stories featuring murderous sock monkeys, violent eroticism, and, most notably, the “Copacabana at Midnight,” which sees an aging sex worker give herself to the sexual goddess Pomba Gira. Brewer’s poems transition naturally, with shared themes and imagery often feeding from one piece into the next like a tributary into a river. “Our Secret Dale” is a dream of an unrushed time with a faraway love “to taste your pillowed lips sublime.” This is followed by one of the numbered, fantasy-themed works in which passion becomes more sinister and savage: “She’s with me in my dream again. / Her warm touch burns upon my skin.” Imagery like this is used time and again to deftly shift the tone without ever feeling like a non sequitur. The albatross around the neck of this collection is its third section. Though the titular tale and a run-in with a poisonous sea slug make perfect sense, the inclusion of more modern horror and Ralph Ellison–esque SF stories feels like a splash of cold water in the face. A personal essay about the living death of cancer, though moving, also seems out of place among the book’s heavily curated nautical themes.

A seafaring poetry collection that sails smoothly until some short fiction knocks it off course.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-956803-44-0

Page Count: 260

Publisher: Goldtouch Press, LLC

Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


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  • National Book Award Finalist

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

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THE MESSAGE

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Bearing witness to oppression.

Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”

A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024

ISBN: 9780593230381

Page Count: 176

Publisher: One World/Random House

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024

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