An impassioned manifesto.
The power of the poetic.
A poet, speechwriter, educator, political organizer, and activist, Felix melds memoir, history, and political critique to argue for the significance of poetry “to mark the design of the world we see and the world we desire to conjure.” As a student at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Felix was an incorrigible rebel. “The American education system,” she decided, “is the first place where the imagination of the oppressor is made material in the life of the subordinate.” She found a more congenial learning community at Urban Word NYC, where practicing poets taught poetic structure: “I lapped it up like a thirsty animal,” she writes, “letting it fill me.” But her connection to poetry was subsumed by political work as a speechwriter and press secretary for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and a speechwriter for Elizabeth Warren. Both left her frustrated; disillusioned, she returned to poetry. “The poet witnesses our ignorance and tells us about the material and spiritual power of language, that which shapes our reality,” she asserts. “The poet tells us the truest stories about who we are.” Among the poems that Felix includes in this volume are “erasure poems” formed by redacting legal documents, such as the South Carolina Slave Code of 1740, the No Child Left Behind Act, and Executive Order No. 147: A Special Prosecutor to Investigate and Prosecute Matters Relating to the Deaths of Civilians Caused by Law Enforcement Officers. What surfaces after the redaction are stark indictments of racism and oppression. Felix sees poetry as consistent with activism, inspiring a response and eliciting action. “It is not the poem that changes the world,” she writes, “but the poem that changes the person.” The poem “is always political.”
An impassioned manifesto.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780593242148
Page Count: 192
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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