An open-hearted but premature collection of Covid-19 poetry.
A topical collection offers joyful and mournful poems from quarantine.
A poet isolated and housebound by Covid-19 will inevitably write some pieces about it. In this brief collection, Robbins includes 23 poems occasioned by the pandemic, divided into three sections for the first three months of the outbreak. They begin with hopeful images and gestures, as here, from the opening of the first poem: “The sun doesn’t know / there’s a Coronavirus. / He shows up daily— / not burning, but smiling, / warming.” Even when one of the poet’s childhood friends contracts the disease, Robbins finds a way to cast it in an inspirational light, evoking her cohort’s great talent for dancing when they were girls: “She will laugh, and I will, with her, / and just see if her warrior T-cells don’t / inexplicably leap, legs open in a split, / like no cells anyone has ever seen, magnificent, / breathtaking, like her leaps when she was ten. / And she will heal.” In one piece, the poet chips her tooth biting into a chicken thigh but is afraid to go to the dentist due to the outbreak. In others, she is compelled to write odes to friends who have not survived the disease. “Coakley’s Crayons,” one hopeful lyric, discusses a neighbor girl who, having little to do while stuck at home during the pandemic, draws an optimistic picture of the world with the poet’s pastels. Robbins is effective at communicating direct, concentrated emotions even if she sometimes does so in trite language. “Lockdown Affirmation” achieves its slogan-y effect with some rather obvious rhymes: “I am strong, I am smart. / My survival’s now an art, / My goal not simply to survive / But please, to find a way to thrive.” The book darkens somewhat as it goes on and the severity of the pandemic becomes more apparent. “April Is the Cruelest Month” reads like an angry tweet: “Eighty thousand dead / in the US / and still not enough / testing.” For the most part, the poems feel like first drafts: The sentiments are a bit on-the-nose, and their attempts to capture the magnitude of the event mostly read as unsure and overly earnest (particularly given that people are now quite a bit past the first three months, temporally and psychologically). Even so, Robbins strikes upon a few honest moments, as in the simple “Toilet Paper”: “It’s back! / You can get it! / At last!”
An open-hearted but premature collection of Covid-19 poetry.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Shining Tree Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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