An uneven but impactful portfolio of work across genres from an inventive creator.
An artist and writer offers painting, pottery, and poems reflecting her autistic worldview in this collection of verse and art.
The visual arts have long been a source of release and exploration for Eyer, based on Washington state’s Whidbey Island. As she explains in her introduction, “We autistic people develop love through visualizing every object as we wish it to be, pottery clay and color folds and molds as values touch and materialize.” Her paintings are generally abstract, though they evoke the wildness and dynamism of the natural world, as in the reds and yellows of “Mt. Rainier in Fall.” The sculptures are often figurative—dogs, iguanas, human faces—though these sometimes, too, are less definable, recalling the mix of organic and inorganic forms of ancient objects recovered from the sea floor. A blend of the natural and the human is also found in the poems, like “Realize Life’s Freedoms”: “Seas swell sad when a quiet afternoon yields way to death / From reasons each wave ascends and crashes.” The poems, written in both prose and free verse, explore topics like womanhood, friendship, God, and the passage of time. The poetry tends to be a bit overwrought, as in the prose poem “Eventide”: “Only fascinating hate underlies it all. Just think there is no sense in symphonies by God conducting concerts lost in destiny’s noiseless ears.” But the art—the paintings, in particular—displays a tremendous amount of vision and control. The deconstructed landscapes of the eruptive, green-dominated “Spring” and the pine-forested “Memories of Beauty” and “River Serene” manage to stir and calm at the same time. Eyer shows her humor in works like “Bee Careful” (which features a swarm of splotches reminiscent of honeybees) and her powerful sense of composition in the dramatic, mournful seascape “Lost Haven.” Taken together, the works demonstrate Eyer’s highly impressionistic and idiosyncratic perspective—just the sort of viewpoint an artist should have. The color and texture of words as well as paint provide the necessary intensity to give voice to her experiences and emotions. It’s an intensity that readers will carry away with them.
An uneven but impactful portfolio of work across genres from an inventive creator.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73496-020-4
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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