An earnest, if disjointed, reflection on life’s end and its aftermath.
Hagood explores the nature of life after death in this unconventional collection of prose poems about grief.
“All I want to do since losing my father is molt in my nest,” the author begins this book, which she later describes as a “séance.” In the book’s first section, “Death as the Ulysses of Desperate Housewives,” she tells of grief manifesting as compulsive Google searches about ghosts, binge-reading about death, and translating foreign recipes, then cooking while listening to audiobooks. She makes a list of talking points “in case I ever get to speak to my father again. You never know,” and contemplates how writing can be a kind of time machine, returning her to when her dad was still alive. The second section, “Death as the Beginning of Dracula,” backtracks to her father’s rapid deterioration from cancer: “He’s unconscious, one cyclopean eye ajar but unseeing, still green but clouded,” she reports. His mortality also prompts contemplation about the author’s mother’s eventual demise, then her own: “What if I were to see death as the most gorgeous part of life? Or, more particularly, as something audacious that exceeds life?” she wonders. In the third section, “Death as Furiosa,” set after her dad’s death, Hagood takes a broader look at the world around her, including wars abroad, neighborhood violence, and online vitriol. Throughout, she incorporates philosophy, literature, pop culture, and SF references—from Cicero and Ray Bradbury to Blade Runnerand the Star Warssaga’s Yoda—into her wide-ranging examinations. As a result, the narrative can feel overly scattered at times, veering from film commentary to parenting anecdotes to the consequences of a viral climate change tweet. Hagood’s observations on the parallels between writing and mourning are particularly astute in lines such as “all writers are mediums, talking daily with the deceased, resurrecting, bringing back ghost truths from the underworld.” Her prose poems are equally creative in their descriptions, such as one of New York City as “a dead cement isle” where “commuters step over people sleeping on the subway platform like they were plastic bags.”
An earnest, if disjointed, reflection on life’s end and its aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781963908503
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 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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