Weighty, unflinchingly honest writing that sometimes takes an unfortunate discriminatory tone.
McCormick’s keenly observed if unsettling debut poetry collection reflects on death and illness.
“Who wants to hear how mellow you feel, / and who wants to write about it?” asks McCormick in a poem entitled “Mellowed Out.” The collection, written over the last three and a half decades, has few moments of levity; the poet, instead, steels himself to face the darker aspects of human existence. The foreboding opening poem, “Great Decisions,” approaches the failings of humankind—particularly those of governments—and underlines a necessity to change or perish: “The air we breathe is turning us gray. / We must decide if we will stay.” “The Ending” has a significantly more intimate tone in its examination of a relationship breakdown: “It’s like I said hello, / and you were dead, / and you never heard what I said.” McCormick’s focus continues in this manner, zooming in to explore personal relationships—an elegy for a friend dying of AIDS or a prose poem in the form of a spiky “Conversation Between Spouses”—before drawing out to address universal questions such as the pursuit of success, midlife crisis, and the absence of God. McCormick’s writing is frank and uncompromising. In the deliciously cynical poem, “Getting Old,” he observes: “You see a new beauty in nature. / You hear peace and quiet. / The reasons are your vision has blurred / and your hearing has failed.” He possesses the rare ability to capture emotions and sensations effortlessly. “Holding On” pinpoints the shifting state of depression: “In the best of times, the cold, broad sword of / boredom lies across my chest and makes me afraid to move.” McCormick’s approach toward race, however, is disconcerting. In the poem “Chinese People,” for example, the narrator says, “I can’t decide whether they have short legs or long bodies.” The poem unsatisfactorily tries to make amends by asking “Imagine if I were looking through their eyes.” Similarly, New York City is declared as the “Brownest damned place I’ve ever seen,” and McCormick suggests that a “Klanner would be freaked-out there. / A dedicated member would have to wear two hoods.”
Weighty, unflinchingly honest writing that sometimes takes an unfortunate discriminatory tone.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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