A volume of poetry and prose that offers heroic visions of urban African Americans.
A debut multigenre collection of short pieces presents vignettes focusing on the lives of African Americans from a variety of perspectives, both real and fanciful.
This eclectic anthology begins with an autobiographical sketch, “P Is for Pride and Perseverance,” in which King traces his early years from his 1979 birth to a 16-year-old mother to his incarceration for attempted robbery and his subsequent determination to do something positive with his life. “Baby Girl” reprises the story of King’s birth from his mother’s point of view, a girl whose teen pregnancy seems predestined by both her grandmother’s clairvoyant dreams and her own limited expectations. Other narratives are linked by shared characters, such as “Posse Up, Ladies First!” and “Thug Angel,” which provide somewhat idealized portraits of street gangs as building blocks of the black community. “Battle Kats” is an SF work about a group of humanoid felines from another planet who work undercover to defend Earth and its alien allies. The central section of the book is occupied by a collection of 21 poems. Some, like “Hold on to Love” and “Away From Home,” focus on romance while others, such as “The Rent Is Too Damn High!” and “Blockstars,” illuminate the experiences of working-class African Americans in inner-city neighborhoods. “Remember Me?” calls up the spirit of LaTasha Harlins, a young black woman shot by a Los Angeles shop owner in the early ’90s, speculating “I wonder what you could have been LaTasha?” King’s efforts to describe his personal struggles and the vibrant characters who populate impoverished black communities are ambitious and dynamic. His prose narratives are too short to feel really complete, but they deliver glimpses into a world mainly familiar to the urban poor, where drug dealing is one of the few available career choices, incarceration is a rite of passage, and street gangs view themselves as community leaders. While the author does have a tendency to romanticize life on the street, as in “Posse Up,” in which a girl gang maintains a strict “code of principles,” his writing presents a vision of what could happen if people worked to “play a part in the improvement of the community.”
A volume of poetry and prose that offers heroic visions of urban African Americans.Pub Date: March 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4568-8093-4
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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