Sometimes overambitious but consistenly stirring collection that finds novel ways to explore memory, lust, and loss.
Pittman takes a deep dive into personal relationships in this book of poems.
Human connection, memory, and longing take centerstage in this poetry collection based on the author’s past relationships. In the opening poem, “The Battle of Chattanooga,” Pittman compares leaving a loved one to a Civil War battle: He longs to be a wounded soldier in the excitement of battle rather than experience the more banal psychological wounds from the mundane breakup he’s currently experiencing. “Memphis” features a woman who dreamed of the titular city and contemplates how it “will reach out its warm southern hand / and take her in, / opening its doors to all its secret places” (but she never makes it there). The poet has a penchant for articulating deceptively simple observations about random encounters in nature: in one example, the discovery of a dead bird jostles a memory, prompting the speaker to “sing to it my simple song, / its chorus about your uncertain smile, / its refrain the music of your laughter, / each note like the sound of a choir, almost murmuring, / deep, deep in my heart.” Or in “What I Cannot Forget” the speaker ambitiously associates a woman’s physique with the beauty of the natural world: “Your shoulders are the hills of some unnamable country, / covered by an early snow, / lit by the light of exploding stars.” Pittman, in the titular poem, writes movingly about the longing to forge connections by any means necessary: “We could talk as the cars thin out / on the broken avenues. / And you don’t even have to speak. / Just keep looking at me as the moment passes, / And all the moments that come after.” The verse here is consistently visceral and evocative, and Pittman conveys longing in a familiar but elegant way. However, his poems inspired by Freud, Kierkegaard, archeology, and paleontology can seem overintellectualized and may be difficult for some readers to plow through.
Sometimes overambitious but consistenly stirring collection that finds novel ways to explore memory, lust, and loss.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798218508418
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Outbreak Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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