Naffziger’s poetry boldly emancipates the soul from its worldly shell.
Naffziger dismantles the familiar in this volume of poetry.
The title poem, “Strange Bodies,” introduces the collection’s central of theme of knowing as it pertains to the body—the only tangible vessel we have to navigate the world: “The fact of the matter is / your body operates in total darkness.” The poems are not unnerving; rather, the speaker gently invites the reader to surrender to chaos of human experience. Later in the collection, the speaker further underscores the fallibility of knowing: “By the time you arrive you will know / what I know or more than I know” (“Poem to my Younger Self”). Naffziger’s use of contrasting imagery, especially in the poems that deal with death, is stunning: In “In Delirium: A Pantoum,” the body transcends this life to become, simultaneously, both stardust and a corpse (“Without a body, my limbs / are shattered stars blasting cosmic radiation / through every breath I ever took… / …turned by time, buried beneath sediment”). The striking contrast between two husbands and wives emerges in elegant couplets that marry life with death in “A Tale of Two Women”: “Today I make gazpacho while Joe is dying. / My husband picks tomatoes and cucumbers, // carries them to the kitchen like he always does. / I peel oxhearts. Billie holds her husband’s hand.” The empathy, verging on telepathy, that binds the halves of each couplet evokes the deepest kind of human connection. The end of the book links a series of poems with black-and-white photographs by Mark Hackworth. Some poems tell stories of family, of generations living and dead, existing together in the tapestry of familial bonds. Other poems play with ideas from theoretical physics in a bid to make sense of human experience. The physical is always imbued with the metaphysical in these verses as the author steps back from the confines of time and space to make room for the infinite possibilities of existence and promote an almost Buddhist philosophy of the interconnectedness of all things.
Naffziger’s poetry boldly emancipates the soul from its worldly shell.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781945049361
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Shadelandhouse Modern Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
SEEN & HEARD
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