A lovingly crafted portrait of a person and a place.
In fragments of memory and description, Fletcher (Descanso for My Father, 2012) recalls his mother’s life, his family history, and a New Mexico that’s disappearing.
In this unusual work of creative nonfiction, the author’s memories spill out like newly discovered treasures. In a narrative framed by his visit to his aging mother in his native New Mexico, Fletcher provides a series of prose poems—some short, some essay-length—inspired by artifacts that his artist mother “rescued” from the desert and his own explorations of places he heard about in childhood stories. The book lacks a strictly linear plot and is instead organized into eight thematic sections with titles that evoke their moods, including “homing,” “root,” and “nostalgia.” Fletcher’s prose vividly depicts the New Mexican landscape; for example, he describes a valley as “the small of a woman’s back, an earthen hollow beneath the shoulder blades,” and a river as a “mud-brown tapeworm.” When he arrives at his mother’s house during a storm, he realizes how little he knows “of her life—and how it came to be,” so he delves back in time, uncovering stories of his grandparents, his great-grandparents, and other ancestors, which border on folklore. Along the way, he pieces together a family history, with memories overlapping one another through multiple generations. In these stories, a complete picture of his mother gradually emerges—as a young girl, as a wife, as a widow, and as an artist. The tales sometimes evoke the supernatural, including “presentimientos,” or visions of loved ones at their deaths, which he says once “happened all the time.” These hints of magical realism complement the dreamlike writing and the prominence of the natural world in it. “We live in a world of miracles,” his mother says at one point. Fletcher’s book is a chronicle of all the quiet miracles that make a life.
A lovingly crafted portrait of a person and a place.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938769-13-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Autumn House Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.
Jackie Kennedy's secret service agent Hill and co-author McCubbin team up for a follow-up to Mrs. Kennedy and Me (2012) in this well-illustrated narrative of those five days 50 years ago when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Since Hill was part of the secret service detail assigned to protect the president and his wife, his firsthand account of those days is unique. The chronological approach, beginning before the presidential party even left the nation's capital on Nov. 21, shows Kennedy promoting his “New Frontier” policy and how he was received by Texans in San Antonio, Houston and Fort Worth before his arrival in Dallas. A crowd of more than 8,000 greeted him in Houston, and thousands more waited until 11 p.m. to greet the president at his stop in Fort Worth. Photographs highlight the enthusiasm of those who came to the airports and the routes the motorcades followed on that first day. At the Houston Coliseum, Kennedy addressed the leaders who were building NASA for the planned moon landing he had initiated. Hostile ads and flyers circulated in Dallas, but the president and his wife stopped their motorcade to respond to schoolchildren who held up a banner asking the president to stop and shake their hands. Hill recounts how, after Lee Harvey Oswald fired his fatal shots, he jumped onto the back of the presidential limousine. He was present at Parkland Hospital, where the president was declared dead, and on the plane when Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. Hill also reports the funeral procession and the ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery. “[Kennedy] would have not wanted his legacy, fifty years later, to be a debate about the details of his death,” writes the author. “Rather, he would want people to focus on the values and ideals in which he so passionately believed.”
Chronology, photographs and personal knowledge combine to make a memorable commemorative presentation.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3149-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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