Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation.
A writer digs into the past “to retrieve what was lost.”
Nutt follows up her debut poetry collection, Wilderness Champion, with her first book of prose, a spare gathering of 18 numbered, interrelated essays (a “personal canon”) comprised of memories held together by fragmentary, epigrammatic thoughts, images, and lists. Running throughout the text are references to literary works, word etymologies, and films, in particular monster or horror movies—zombie, vampire, slasher, etc.—which Nutt juxtaposes against confessional, often painful personal reflections. “Horror is a reaction, recognition, a response to a call,” she writes. Sorrow and death haunt her intimate “map of the bereaved”—especially the suicides in Nutt’s family: her father-in-law, uncle, and great uncle—and quiet ruminating and somber musing abound. “If we attach ourselves to art,” writes the author, “maybe art can attach itself to us….I am making a lineage of what lingers.” Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? lurks in the background as Nutt ponders her experiences as a participant in child beauty pageants. “Each second,” she writes, “tilted toward another chance to prove I was charming and beautiful.” Wondering if anyone died in the house she lived in, she thinks about visiting a website that provides such information but decides against it, “too afraid to know.” The author’s descriptions of relationships—childhood, family, friends, sexual—weave in and out, like walking into different rooms to experience what is there, try to understand it, feel it, question it, and then move on to another room. She worries that “despair is contagious and if I’m not careful I’ll infect everyone around me.” Putting together her book, piece by piece, is an act of belief, as Nutt tries “to write my own self back” from the dead. Here, “survival is attached to telling.” Although obtuse and rambling at times, the strange, uncanny prose rhythms created in these essays are affecting, like lucid dreams.
Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953387-00-4
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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