A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support.
An anthology of poems, essays, interviews, and reflections inspired by the COVID-19 lockdown, with proceeds benefitting independent booksellers.
During the pandemic, book tours have been cancelled, bookstores closed, and book deals delayed. What is the literary community to do? Write about it, of course, and try to find or make some meaning out of a period when everything seems so uncertain and unstable. Editor Haupt describes the book, which features contributions from “90 authors (68 in the print book and another 22 in the e-book edition),” as “this Lovely Monster,” one that addresses “a vast, overwhelming question that became the pumping heart of this book: What Now?” Of course, there are plenty of mournful pieces concerning illness and death in pandemic isolation, but importantly, there’s a sense that life goes on, reinforcing the spirit of interconnectedness as so many of us remain apart. “In telling our stories, we hope to enable you to tell your story,” writes Haupt. “That’s the sweet spot of connections, where the healing happens.” Many of the essays find some consolation in the feelings of grace and emotions of tenderness we experience now that we’re no longer living in what Luis Alberto Urrea describes as “our continual tantrum of consumption and aggression.” In a hopeful interview with Haupt, Urrea describes those suffering through isolation as “yearning for our better selves, desperately dreaming of a kinder world in the days to come.” The collection is diverse in age, race, and ethnicity, and gender perspective is a focus of many of the pieces, which offer informed speculation on the many ways that things will never be the same. In addition to some voices that may not be widely known, the book includes a smorgasbord of big names: Kwame Alexander, Nikki Giovanni, David Sheff, Lidia Yuknavitch, Dani Shapiro, Garth Stein, Andre Dubus III, Dinty Moore, and Ada Limón.
A heartening gathering of writers joining forces for community support.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77168-228-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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