An exquisite book of poems about living and dying.
Sanchez presents a set of poems that feature a lifetime of tiny moments and memories.
This collection of poems is divided into two parts: “The Light and Madness of Isopsephy,” and “A Table for Ghosts.” Lynne’s stunning illustrations are interspersed throughout: some full-page painterly images in muted browns and blues, ignited by unexpectedly vibrant fiery colors, others line drawings in the margins; many are of people and objects surrounded by nature. The book moves between various grand concepts, including the chasm between life and death that is the act of dying, and death itself, which is sometimes treated as melancholy, and at other times a relief. Early in the collection, the poem “Transgressions” points out that endings can’t be clear-cut, offering a warning to take nothing for granted: “And so it goes, the way of things, / the alliance of life and death— / always building tonight, what could be demolished when we rise.” Sometimes poems speak in the second person and evoke the voice of a mother, or, perhaps unassumingly, a mystic, as in “Stranger, Settler, Busybody”: “Sometimes this life is so vast and deep it’s hard to believe we hold every bit of it in / ourselves. Your heart is a hospice. / Everything is god, after all.” The collection includes prose poems that effectively capture every detail of a moment with sensory images, familiar similes, and tenderness. The edges of New York City colorfully provide the backdrops of many poems, such as the Hudson River in “The Calculation of Pressure on Coal” and rainy Brooklyn in “Parchment”: “The sidewalk is a smashed piñata of bodega umbrellas.” In “Acatalepsy and More,” the speaker finally asks: “What if, one day, the earth forgets we were ever here at all?” The poems approach death with honesty while honoring the complex majesty of life, which is, in turn, made more precious by virtue of its impermanence. The collection is strangely comforting, with engrossing micro-stories and transporting colors and details.
An exquisite book of poems about living and dying.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 96
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.
A genre-bending book that grapples with the diffuse and uncategorizable enormity of personal loss.
A woman wakes alone in her guest bedroom, grieving the dissolution of her marriage to an emotionally manipulative writer. A woman returns home to her apartment, spying a pool of blood creeping under the neighbor’s door. Each woman narrates one half of Lacey’s latest literary experiment, a recursive story told in two parts: a novella and a memoir entwined with one another. The effect is unsettling, like experiencing the lost memory of a book even as you turn its pages. “I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then—again, or for the first time—how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself,” Lacey writes in the opening page of the memoir section. The “toy version of herself” might be what Lacey transposes into the novella, about a woman confronting her role in the end of her marriage while growing ever more anxious about a possible murder next door. Then again, maybe not. “Ha ha, we said, yet again someone has confused the voice of a fictional character for an authorial statement of belief,” Lacey and her husband assure one another in the memoir. Across both sections of the book, Lacey offers meditations on faith, violence, friendship, and dislocation. With scalpellike precision, she teases out connections between her childhood experiences with loving and losing God and losing her faith in love as an adult. There are no easy endings in this doubled book, just an infinity loop of questions and possibilities, a twinned bank of pay phones ringing in the night, waiting for someone to answer.
A literary haunting that will burrow under your skin.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780374615406
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
A facile New Age story in which the author and his wife are initiated into the cult of angels by a band of women bikers in the Mojave Desert. Coelho (The Alchemist, 1993) tells how, at the bidding of his "Master," a wealthy businessman, he and his wife, Chris, go off into the desert for 40 days to look for his guardian angel. They find their enlightenment first from Gene, a young man who lives in a trailer, and finally from eight women, known as the Valkyries, who roam the desert on motorcycles and whose wild leader, Valhalla, becomes the couple's mystagogue. Coelho's basic message is that Paradise is open and angels are present if only we break the pact of our self-betrayal and learn to conquer fear and the distractions of our "second mind." Unfortunately, he fails to go anywhere with this potentially exciting but hardly original vision. What he offers is a kind of doctrinal salad in which belief in angels, channeling, and casual sex are mixed with references to Magic rites, Catholic worship, and reincarnation. Coelho uses his characters to emphasize the dubious position that spiritual knowledge can be gained without any connection to how one lives. At times his wisdom turns out to be the familiar exhortation to follow our dreams, and he asserts, without clarification, that we are all manifestations of the Absolute. Coelho's ignorance and superficiality are most blatant when he tells us that St. Mary of Egypt was canonized for her promiscuity and is remembered by almost no one today, whereas in fact, she was converted during her famous visit to Jerusalem, spent the rest of her life as a penitent, and is solemnly commemorated every year by the Orthodox Church all over the world. More pap for the spiritually challenged.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-251291-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
