Free-spirited ideals couched in fairly infectious rhymes.
Poems that embrace spoken-word rhythms and hippie principles, inspired by the author’s love of music and nature, her peace activism, and her gratitude for Jewish community.
With this collection’s title, Lang (Id Biscuits, 2016, etc.) styles herself a flâneuse—in tongue-in-cheek contrast to a poet laureate. Her verse matches that loose, languid persona thanks to its slang vocabulary (“Ain’t,” “gonna,” “coulda,” “cos”) and poetry-slam cadences. “To Get Free,” which won Best of Show at the 2015 Solano (California) County Fair, is a prime example of Lang’s informal register and message of nonconformity: “C’mon, baby, hit the reset button on your soul. / Do what you love, and not what you’re told.” It’s largely composed of rhyming couplets, like the majority of these poems. Although line and stanza lengths vary, the consistent rhyme and punchy wordplay show that these poems would lend themselves well to oral performance. However, some rhymes edge toward the cheesy (“schmoozing”/“losing,” “whack”/“snack,” “speck”/“trek”). Lang’s themes include wanderlust, love for nature (and especially hiking in the California hills), religious devotion, paying the bills versus living the artist’s life, and transforming from a passive pacifist to an activist. “You gave me lungs, / so that I might breathe peace” expresses forthright praise to God in “What You Created,” and elsewhere, verse expresses delight in Jewish practice: “There’s music and Torah both running through my soul,” she observes—a quirky combination that brings to mind a Jewish Janis Joplin. In the satirical “Doves in Season,” the traditional peace symbol is being hunted. “Fear not the rocking boat,” another poem advises, encouraging readers to question racism, capitalism, and America’s reliance on weapons. There’s “more than one way to be an American,” the poem “Headline Antidote” insists; indeed, this collection imagines a peaceful, joyful future America. Some readers may dismiss this poetry as naïvely hippie-esque—its sentiments can be clichéd and repetitive, and the book would have benefited from culling and subheadings—but its righteous enthusiasm is admirable.
Free-spirited ideals couched in fairly infectious rhymes.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5187-1324-8
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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