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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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