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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
