Remarkably well-crafted verses that feel alive to the fullness of experience.
Poems of creation and destruction located in the earthly and spiritual worlds feature in this collection.
In his debut book of poems, including many previously published in literary magazines, Hargreaves draws, in part, on his translation of contemporary Nepalese poet Durga Lal Shrestha’s works in The Blossoms of Sixty-Four Sunsets (2014). His own “Sense and Reference,” set in Patan, Nepal, pairs two columns of stanzas; at left, the poet recounts a conversation with a Nepalese friend working out the meanings of mākhu, a word for many disparate flavors, such as those of bananas, rice flakes, and avocados. He doesn’t get it, concluding that “Clearly, I have no taste / and no clue.” On the right-hand side, a column in italics describes birds and animals above and around a temple carved with erotic images, said to protect the temple from “the prudish / virgin goddess of lightning.” Like many other poems in the book, this one contrasts the mundane—a tea stall, a snack—with the numinous while also drawing connections between them. The mystery of taste, the birds and monkeys living their animal lives, the sculptured tantric couplings, the casual conversation effectively intertwine like the words of a poem itself. The poet explores other seeming dualities in other works, including birth and death, fate and chance, and the natural and human-made worlds; there is a clear sense of longing for connection as well as images of thirst, hunger, and desire. Although one poem (“News at Eleven”) employs the hendecasyllable meter of classical poetry, most are written in free verse that’s lushly allusive yet chiseled to essentials. The prosody is marked by pleasing alliteration and assonance, as in “Now & Then,” in which the K and T sounds in “O’ Kālī, O’ Time” ripple through the poem (“taught us / to tally”; “chit / for each goat”; “match goat to chit”).
Remarkably well-crafted verses that feel alive to the fullness of experience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-937968-93-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Broadstone Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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