A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.
Burrell presents a deeply personal anthology of poetry.
The author explores many themes in this evocative poetry collection, including family, loss, and social issues like mass shootings and Covid-19. Burrell’s strongest pieces touch on human connection and examine how people reconcile their past with their present, as illustrated by the piece “Midlife”: “Everything’s falling fast / like four decades of dominoes lined up / as something shaped like my life.” Much of the work is moving, like “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky,” which takes the form of a news interview mash-up following the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. Burrell’s writing is vividly descriptive in its scene-setting, painting a clear and redolent picture of both the physical surroundings and the emotions contained in the verses, as in “Do Not Drive Into Smoke”: “That house had a cellar, / lightless, dingy, that smelled like pond mud, / like cigarette butts floating in a bucket / of rainwater.” Readers can feel the grief of the speaker in “Unable To Sing.” One of the standout pieces is “Exact Change Pantoum,” another example of the speaker contemplating one’s life and choices: “I followed loss through the forest and crossed fields… / …I had my head / in night clouds, and behind them years, dulled stars, / like spit wads on a blackboard! I wasted all my breath / trying not to lose it….” Burrell’s pieces are sometimes more experimental in their composition, like the aforementioned “This Is Asteroid Fell Out of the Sky” as well as “Blind Spots Hide Motorcycles Look Twice: A Matching Quiz,” in which readers are tasked with matching up opposing statements that are poignant in any configuration they choose.
A stirring and distinctively intimate compilation of poems.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781958094433
Page Count: 74
Publisher: Eastover Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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