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
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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