A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.
Lonesome people inhabit a forlorn landscape in this poetic and photographic meditation on Texas.
Smith, an Austin-based singer/songwriter, arranges poems, song lyrics, brief essays, and photos into “a love song to the mythology of Texas.” The book’s soul resides in its dozens of images of the West Texas plains, which show scrubby, arid prairies with tufts of grass, weedy tendrils, clumps of trees—often bare and wintry—and the occasional yucca; the land dimly stretches away under threatening clouds until it meets hills that either sparkle with promise under a shaft of sunlight or form a black, imprisoning wall. The human presence is seen in artifacts: highways and railroad tracks converging toward the horizon; rust-stained Quonset huts and oil tanks; tires abandoned against a sagging fence. Photographed with an old Polaroid in black and white with a hint of sepia, these hazy, cunningly artless snapshots capture terrain that feels nearly vacant but suffused with meaning. Smith’s writings are similarly shaped by Texan vistas, whether in an essay on the geology of the plains, which were the bottoms of ancient seas before they became highways for herds and people, or in a plaintive love song that gives the book its name: “And the stars they are falling from your eyes / And my love, my love was on the rise / And I am in between you and some horizon line / Underneath the western skies.” Smith’s pen is as good as his camera at evoking the gritty physicality of the Lone Star State and opening it up to human energy and emotion, as in his entrancing poem “Necklace”: “Just after the first gas station coming into town, / I see abandoned oil rigs, houses with dirt and cactus front yards, / …. / A dual cab Ford truck screams / Up behind me and passes. / Two teenage white kids in the front smoke / And nod their heads to the bass crunch / Of some guy singing about life in Newark or L.A.” The result is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.
A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.Pub Date: March 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947297-42-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Dexterity
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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