An intricate gem of a poetic debut.
Grace’s debut poetry collection ponders language and meaning.
“I wrote this book because I am interested in how meaning is created,” writes the author in her preface to this new collection. For this emerging poet, meaning is found in the mechanics of human language—specifically word choice and placement—and in the quest to make sense of oneself and the world. The collection is divided into nine sections bearing intriguing, unusual titles, including “Esemplastic,” “Limn,” and “Invariance.” Each section contains a series of poems without titles, numbered in roman numerals. Grace employs a range of poetic forms, from common meter to haiku and pantoums. Some poems contemplate how our relationships with others impact our own identity: “If you are the center of my map—where / am I?” Others consider the act of writing itself: “These marks are a compendium of miscellany / a narrative—translucent, pre-existing and replete.” At the close of some sections, the author includes a “Lyric Glossary” in which she poetically reexamines and reframes specific terms she has used. Grace’s poetry is laden with sensuous imagery: “Ignominious fruit of that garden / my carmine lips, your garnet desire.” The most compelling aspect of this ingenious body of verse is the poet’s determination to excavate ever deeper layers of meaning; Grace returns to the word carmine in her Lyric Glossary, recalling, “a rich red to crimson pigment…I bought a dress that made my skin look like cream and my hair look like amber. / I bought it so that your hands on my waist would look like intent—and they did.” The poet moves beyond cold definitions, adding not only personal significance to the term but pinning it to one intimate moment. She poignantly captures how meaning shifts with time: “a vivid red…I still own that dress. It is packed in a box with other things that don’t fit me anymore.” The poet also demonstrates notable technical prowess, as when priming a villanelle to deliver the powerfully philosophical, doubled-barreled refrain: “What arterial conspiracy was this, aromatic and dusty, rife with pulse and power? / The victor builds the world around himself, calls the edges nothing, the center a flower.” This is the work of an alarming talent.
An intricate gem of a poetic debut.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781945049354
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.
An acclaimed novelist revisits the central characters of his best-known work.
At the end of Brooklyn (2009), Eilis Lacey departed Ireland for the second and final time—headed back to New York and the Italian American husband she had secretly married after first traveling there for work. In her hometown of Enniscorthy, she left behind Jim Farrell, a young man she’d fallen in love with during her visit, and the inevitable gossip about her conduct. Tóibín’s 11th novel introduces readers to Eilis 20 years later, in 1976, still married to Tony Fiorello and living in the titular suburbia with their two teenage children. But Eilis’ seemingly placid existence is disturbed when a stranger confronts her, accusing Tony of having an affair with his wife—now pregnant—and threatening to leave the baby on their doorstep. “She’d known men like this in Ireland,” Tóibín writes. “Should one of them discover that their wife had been unfaithful and was pregnant as a result, they would not have the baby in the house.” This shock sends Eilis back to Enniscorthy for a visit—or perhaps a longer stay. (Eilis’ motives are as inscrutable as ever, even to herself.) She finds the never-married Jim managing his late father’s pub; unbeknownst to Eilis (and the town), he’s become involved with her widowed friend Nancy, who struggles to maintain the family chip shop. Eilis herself appears different to her old friends: “Something had happened to her in America,” Nancy concludes. Although the novel begins with a soap-operatic confrontation—and ends with a dramatic denouement, as Eilis’ fate is determined in a plot twist worthy of Edith Wharton—the author is a master of quiet, restrained prose, calmly observing the mores and mindsets of provincial Ireland, not much changed from the 1950s.
A moving portrait of rueful middle age and the failure to connect.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781476785110
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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