Cryptic, sometimes-baffling works whose intense, colorful language captures the imagination.
A set of enigmatic poems that limn the inner workings of relationships.
Matos, a bisexual-plus author who’s an English professor at the City Colleges of Chicago and a former mixed martial arts fighter, explores a number of personal and confessional themes in these autobiographical works. He hymns his working-class Portuguese American family, despite their difficulty in comprehending his sexuality, and revisits pop-cultural touchstones from his childhood in the 1980s and ’90s—Prince and Madonna songs, Tony Danza’s fetching presence in Who’s the Boss—and their roles in tutoring his desires. Most of all, he dissects convoluted feelings and ironies of love affairs with men, women, and, sometimes, both at once. Matos’ verse often sounds like an address to a lover, full of private intimacies that the reader can’t fully understand. The resolute interiority of this poetry of conflicted yearnings can make it challenging to decipher. At times, the author’s imagery has an abstract tenor that’s arid and uninvolving: “Recall that you are largely rhetorical [anyway] / having evolved to where being used and being useful has little distinction.” At other times, his metaphors are hallucinatory and full of impact, though still puzzling: “She breaks without speaking takes from a muttering of shoulders / a measure of the wreck of us.” Still, these poems are packed with moments of imagistic and emotional power. A few of them, for example, gleefully rub the reader’s nose in a gross earthiness (“like a wet sticky foal / sticky as the bottom of your son’s shoe that never misses / the fresh pile of dog turds near the elementary school”) or offer a tender lyricism with a fairy-tale ring: “He married a woman once / who knew something about singing / and thought his days would be filled with song.”
Cryptic, sometimes-baffling works whose intense, colorful language captures the imagination.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9913780-2-9
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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