Greenwood’s debut, a beautifully illustrated poetry volume, describes the painful end of a marriage and the journey toward acceptance.
A frontispiece with two excised hearts bearing the disclaimer, “I was a pretty shitty wife” prefaces this collection, which describes the collapse of a 10-year relationship. Gone are happier days when the couple traveled to Paris and Italy, threw baguettes out of a hostel window, and reveled in the delights of Florentine honey. Back home, “Colony Collapse Disorder” is a stark metaphor for the divorce and the depressing thought that before the marriage ended, bee documentaries foreshadowed that everything she loved “would someday be extinct.” A circumspect view colors the poem “Fall,” in which they crack open a beehive, noting “we never mistook the bees / for angels.” The husband feeds her the honey, but she knows “we couldn’t remain / sound forever.” Other poems reference Emerson, Dante, and ancient Greek myths. In “Pasiphae Admits Her Infidelity,” she breaks the news of her straying to the husband, who tells her “we’ll make it / beautiful, turn this bullshit / into a story.” Her thought in response is spiteful: “That’s when I hate him the most.” A softer tone evolves as the narrator seeks a new life back in the United States in “Honolulu.” Greenwood’s poetry reflects on the past with an unsentimental voice that succeeds in capturing the agonizing feelings of frustration after a significant loss. The nature metaphors, full of bees and cherry blossoms, also work very well, as do poems that are concrete and clearly identify a topic. Some poems are contradictory, unclear, or drop off into nothingness (“you’ll come to me suddenly / your face like like like like”). “The Sound of Ice Melting” wonderfully renders the hissing sounds of the frozen north in a plea for love “until death freezes me shut.”
A forthright, imaginative collection that has moments of clarity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sphinx Moth Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | GENERAL NONFICTION
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The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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A slender, highly satisfying collection.
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A dozen pieces of nonfiction from the acclaimed novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter.
In an appreciative introduction, New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als praises Didion as “a carver of words in the granite of the specific.” Stylistic precision (“Grammar is a piano I play by ear,” she writes) and the “energy and shimmer” of her prose are fully evident in this volume of previously uncollected pieces, written from 1968 to 2000. Although Didion portrays herself as a diffident, unconfident writer as a college student, she learned “a kind of ease with words” when working at Vogue, where she was assigned to write punchy, concise copy. The experience, she recalls, was “not unlike training with the Rockettes.” Several pieces were originally published in magazines, and two were introductions: one, to a volume of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe; another, to a memoir by director—and Didion’s friend—Tony Richardson. All reveal the author’s shrewd, acerbic critical eye. In “Getting Serenity,” she reports on a meeting of Gamblers Anonymous, where, she notes sardonically, one woman “adapted her mode of public address from analgesic commercials.” William Randolph Hearst’s “phantasmagoric barony,” San Simeon, “seemed to confirm the boundless promise of the place we lived,” but, she decided, was best admired from afar, like a fairy-tale castle, “floating fantastically.” Didion’s rejection from Stanford elicited an essay about college as consumption, and her skewering of consumption and artifice recur as themes—for example, in her observation of the ways women stage themselves for portrait photographs. Several particularly revealing essays focus on writing: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking,” she famously admitted, a statement often misattributed to others. Writing, for her, is “the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.” As these pieces show, it’s also an accomplished act of seduction.
A slender, highly satisfying collection.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-31848-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION
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