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 football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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