A slender collection of essays explores the role of race in poetry and life.
A writer of South Asian descent wonders how to live—and write—in a country that both “values and devalues” him.
Poet Bolina explores race and other topics in 10 personal essays rooted in his experience of growing up as the only child of Sikh Punjabi immigrants in the Chicago area. His perspective tends to be stereoscopic, especially in his first essay, “Empathy for the Devil,” which deals with the killing of Osama bin Laden: “When I hear that he’s dead, I don’t feel anything resembling sorrow, but watching the young men in trees outside the White House waving flags and chanting USA! USA! I don’t feel any kind of pride either. Both sides of the conflict seem barbaric. They killed one of them. Neither side includes me.” Bolina’s gift for seeing diverse viewpoints resurfaces in later essays. In “Writing Like a White Guy,” he considers how to write truthfully when a privileged education has left him with “only the parlance of whiteness to express my brownness.” In “White Wedding,” he reflects on his marriage to a white woman, on brown-white romances in the media, and on Americans’ tendency to see pop stars of color as a “racial vanguard.” “As much as any vanguard represents progress,” writes the author, “these trailblazers aren’t evidence of a nation’s sudden embrace of diversity so much as evidence of the majority’s self-congratulatory tolerance of it.” Most of the essays unfold as a series of vignettes or scenes, some so brief that they short-circuit the development of promising ideas. Along with other limits, that underdevelopment makes the book a minor collection in this arena. However, the author shows flashes of promise on which to build in the future, and given that many of the pieces deal with the intersection of race and writing, the book will interest creative writing students and programs.
A slender collection of essays explores the role of race in poetry and life.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-944211-86-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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