An enjoyable volume featuring a diverse contingent of artists.
A publisher of poetry offers a sample of its contributors’ work and analysis by other poets.
As Carmen Giménez, Graywolf’s publisher, writes in an introduction, the press is dedicated to championing “work and voices that don’t always fit traditional notions of poetry” and “are in conversation” with major issues of their day, from global crises and state violence to border atrocities and more. For this book, they “invited fifty Graywolf poets to select and write about poems they love by other Graywolf poets,” with accompanying essays that “are like ekphrastic poems, or odes, or elegies, or fan letters.” Each brief essay offers either a technical analysis of the chosen work, as when Fred Marchant notes the “iambic feel” of Nick Flynn’s “Saint Augustine,” or a more personal reflection, as when Katie Ford writes that Tess Gallagher’s “Trace, in Unison” makes her “feel like I’m in the poem’s small boat, and she is both gust and sail at once.” Some of the appreciations read like academic papers: Mary Jo Bang notes that Matthea Harvey’s “The Crowds Cheered as Gloom Galloped Away” “takes the abstract and ineffable state of sorrow” and “concretizes it through a series of unlikely pairings of things,” and Jeffrey Yang says Fanny Howe’s poetry displays “her indwelling similization of the world around us.” Most of the poems are first-rate and provide useful introductions to the poets. In one of the better essays, Threa Almontaser writes that, despite its intimations of grief, Tarfia Faizullah’s “Because There’s Still a Sky, Junebug” is a work “of wonderment and conviction” and “encourages us to express both the tragic and the poignant as one, to open our eyes and look.” The same is true of the many other outstanding works in this collection.
An enjoyable volume featuring a diverse contingent of artists.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781644452660
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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