A piercing poetry collection blending personal reflections and societal critiques.
Lunte delves into relationships, American culture, and personal growth in this book of poems.
The author opens this collection by comparing the life of a cicada to their own coming of age, emphasizing the need to shed the past and embrace the new while retaining memories of what came before. Lunte revisits a protest they attended at age 19, now realizing that their young self was unaware “That this system requires // The oppression and fear of the Other / To create and maintain wealth for the privileged few.” Upon Roe v. Wade being overturned, they mourn the ways women’s bodies are controlled and used to maintain the status quo, stating, “Overburdened people / Cannot dream of revolution.” Lunte also examines relationships; “In Memoriam,” a short poem honoring a departed loved one, finds the speaker wondering where love goes after death. In “Discovery of a Soul Mate,” the speaker is “Longing to hear the song of you loving me.” In “The Will to Love,” the author rejects capitalism, deciding that “success / Lies in the capacity to love and be happy.” In an intimate scene, an unidentified speaker washes their flawed feet. In a manifesto-like piece, the speaker states that she is childless by choice and would rather leave her legacy in writing. Some of the author’s more heavy-handed declarations (“I do not long to create life / To cast it into this cold world”) seem to demand solidarity from the reader. The writing is occasionally overwrought, like these lines about overturning Roe v. Wade: “A decision was assented / By a puppet majority; / A revocation of a Woman’s sovereignty.” Lunte’s work is at its best when showing vulnerability, as when she notes, “The pillow still smells like the nook / of your warm body.” They are equally effective at teasing lessons from the natural world in lines like, “Extending myself grace in the same way / That the new leaf, / Soft green and delicate, / Unfurls itself on the naked branch.”
A piercing poetry collection blending personal reflections and societal critiques.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798218498757
Page Count: 57
Publisher: Avalon Park Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2024
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 pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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