by Grace Butler Difalco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2013
A generous, stirring collection honoring loving relationships, hope in hard times and religious devotion.
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Newfoundland-born author Difalco adds to her growing catalog of inspirational verse with a masterful collection of poems.
The author’s latest poetry collection—the first published for an American audience—is a veritable font of wisdom about such profound issues as life, death, family and faith. Like many other talented poets, Difalco uses her own experiences, her memories, and stories told to her as inspiration for verse. In one particularly poignant piece, she reminisces about her grandparents who were lighthouse keepers: “The winds of time now gently flow / The lamps are trimmed and fit / From sunset rays till early dawn / All through the night you sit.” She bases many of her precisely metered verses on real events, as in the stirring “Don’t Leave Me,” about a lone survivor of a plane crash awaiting help in the cold ocean: “I must not drift back into night.” In “Only a Girl,” based on a story told to the poet, an old man buries his wife but sees her only as she was when she was young. Although a few verses reflect larger socioeconomic issues such as homelessness or environmental decay, the main themes are nostalgia and finding strength in religious faith. The collection could have drifted dangerously toward sentimentality, but the author’s deft touch maintains a wise voice throughout, keeping the verses strong and clear rather than melodramatic—a difficult high-wire act for any writer. Despite her tendencies toward Christian themes, nonbelievers may find solace and joy in her descriptions of the power of the natural world and of the comfort of loving family members past and present. This volume might make an excellent gift for friends in need of a touchstone of inspiration.
A generous, stirring collection honoring loving relationships, hope in hard times and religious devotion.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-1452579924
Page Count: 94
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2022
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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by Emmanuel Carrère ; translated by John Lambert
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by Audre Lorde ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2020
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.
The groundbreaking Black lesbian writer and activist chronicles her experience with cancer.
In her mid-40s, Lorde (1934-1992) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. Through prose, poems, and selected journal entries beginning six months after the surgery, the author explores the anger, pain, and fear that her illness wrought. Her recovery was characterized by resistance and learning to love her body again. She envisioned herself as a powerful fighter while also examining the connection between her illness and her activism. “There is no room around me in which to be still,” she writes, “to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women. What is this work all for? What does it matter if I ever speak again or not?” Lorde confronts other tough questions, including the role of holistic and alternative treatments and whether her cancer (and its recurrence) was preventable. She writes of eschewing “superficial spirituality” and repeatedly rejecting the use of prosthesis because it felt like “a lie” at precisely the time she was “seeking new ways of strength and trying to find the courage to tell the truth.” Forty years after its initial publication and with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith, the collection remains a raw reckoning with illness and death as well as a challenge to the conventional expectations of women with cancer. More universally, Lorde’s rage and the clarity that follows offer us a blueprint for facing our mortality and living boldly in the time we have. This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313520-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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by Audre Lorde ; edited by Roxane Gay
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