An earnest summons that finds a sense of purpose inside ecological and existential dread.
Hoffman’s fervent collection of prose poems turns planetary grief and civic fatigue into a plainspoken argument for hope.
These clipped, sermonlike pieces move from climate dread to metaphysical vertigo, then toward a chastened ethic of participation. The opening pages imagine Earth as both a damaged mother and fugitive dwelling (“Momma burns”), yet the planet still offers oceans, woods, boulders, puddles, birds, and the small rituals by which humans remember they belong to a world they keep injuring. Later sections widen the aperture: The Big Bang becomes less a lesson in physics than a myth of inheritance, a reminder that “the carbon in your bones” and “the iron in your blood” bind the body to catastrophe, radiance, and ancient stellar debris. The book is strongest when it lets scale estrange the ordinary: hot coffee, cool pillows, boots, songs, and comfort food appear beside 14 billion years of matter. That interweaving of the household and the cosmic gives the work its humble power. The sharpest lines arrive when the diction hardens into something stranger: “A clump of matter that grew conscious”; “for once it was the world that flinched”; “Our spaceship in the void.” Elsewhere, the poems lean on inherited exhortations—“make a difference,” “change the world,” “do what matters”—and some moral arrivals feel announced, rather than discovered. Still, the collection’s sincerity has ballast, and its short lines, spacious pages, rhetorical questions, and repeated imperatives have the effect of a secular homily, delivered after despair has spent its first violence. This isn’t an oblique or hermetic book; it’s closer to a witnessing, a pep talk, and an ecological lament braided together. Readers who prefer irony may find its earnestness overlit, but the work understands its own wager: that hope, however unfashionable, remains a discipline of attention.
An earnest summons that finds a sense of purpose inside ecological and existential dread.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9798985930030
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.
Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?
Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4726-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A facile New Age story in which the author and his wife are initiated into the cult of angels by a band of women bikers in the Mojave Desert. Coelho (The Alchemist, 1993) tells how, at the bidding of his "Master," a wealthy businessman, he and his wife, Chris, go off into the desert for 40 days to look for his guardian angel. They find their enlightenment first from Gene, a young man who lives in a trailer, and finally from eight women, known as the Valkyries, who roam the desert on motorcycles and whose wild leader, Valhalla, becomes the couple's mystagogue. Coelho's basic message is that Paradise is open and angels are present if only we break the pact of our self-betrayal and learn to conquer fear and the distractions of our "second mind." Unfortunately, he fails to go anywhere with this potentially exciting but hardly original vision. What he offers is a kind of doctrinal salad in which belief in angels, channeling, and casual sex are mixed with references to Magic rites, Catholic worship, and reincarnation. Coelho uses his characters to emphasize the dubious position that spiritual knowledge can be gained without any connection to how one lives. At times his wisdom turns out to be the familiar exhortation to follow our dreams, and he asserts, without clarification, that we are all manifestations of the Absolute. Coelho's ignorance and superficiality are most blatant when he tells us that St. Mary of Egypt was canonized for her promiscuity and is remembered by almost no one today, whereas in fact, she was converted during her famous visit to Jerusalem, spent the rest of her life as a penitent, and is solemnly commemorated every year by the Orthodox Church all over the world. More pap for the spiritually challenged.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-251291-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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