Intriguing ideas highlighted by Kotek’s poetry and largely underserved by his prose.
A collection of poetry and prose exploring topics such as love, devotion, pain, truth, fundamentalism, war and death.
This volume’s primary pleasures are a wealth of diverse syntax and some arresting, insightful images. “Savage,” for instance, describes humanity as “Trespassers, aimless wanderers; / Mere gypsies in our world,” while “Dubiety” ends with a nice metaphor for doubt as “the only canoe, / To row around in the ocean of life.” Long by the standards of poetry and short by the standards of prose, most pieces are divided into sections, and some pieces contain both poetry and prose. The prose occasionally offers compelling ideas, such as the beginning of “Religion”—“Religions should not be given much importance than bathing soaps. In privacy you apply soap on your body. Nobody is bothered what kind of soap you use when you take a bath in your privacy.” But most of the prose is prosaic and flat in its language and pretentious and preachy in content. A four-page piece on “Sex” informs us that “Sex is the topic forbidden by the neomoralist thinkers” and that societal inhibitions mean that “[a] natural thing like breathing is blocked with all the might. Will this have an alternative? No, this has led to perversions rather than alternatives. More homosexuals, lesbians, and more psychopaths are the result.” No representation ever successfully captures every element of the original it depicts, but it’s a bad sign when a writer announces his mistrust of language: “Words are meant to convey, but they are shallow. / The fathomed depths of experience cannot be expounded in words” (“Mind”). Kotek might find words less shallow if he didn’t attempt to squeeze such enormous ideas into such tiny spaces. Hopefully, in a second volume, he plays to the strengths found in his poetry and finds ways to overcome the weaknesses in his prose.
Intriguing ideas highlighted by Kotek’s poetry and largely underserved by his prose.Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462875238
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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