An evocative but cluttered collection by a passionate nature lover.
A Canadian writer who grew up in rural Ontario offers a volume of nature-themed poetry.
As Yeates Camara explains on the copyright page, this book’s title refers to the process of firing a piece of pottery in low oxygen conditions. This is reflected in her minimalist style of poetry. The first part of this collection, “Winter,” explores nature scenes like estuaries, the silent flight of a bird, and the leaves of a Japanese maple tree. In “Lovely,” the poet compares the sparse beauty of bare ranges in winter to mature women. “Make the Best” features forests of older siblings, clouds of aunts, seas of cousins, and a grandfather sun and grandmother moon. Yeates Camara takes on the perspective of a scarecrow in the eponymous poem. A series of numbered poems about love opens the “Autumn” portion. The “Summer” segment presents sensual poems brimming with desire, fantasies, and passion: “I find / my bones yet longing for your weight.” And the “Spring” section starts with a piece dedicated to a woman who succumbed to bipolar depression, then abruptly ends with a series of biblical-style poems about the speaker’s “master.” The author’s descriptions are vivid. A cormorant is portrayed as “slick and near / soundless.” Pines dance “dramatic / slow ballets” while maples move to “lively jazz.” Yeates Camara’s similes are strong, from “rippling like the elephant’s ear / or ticking tails like bulls” to “A heart peaceful and lively / Like a child running arms full span.” But formatting problems make for an arduous reading experience. There are no page breaks between poems, so multiple pieces are crammed onto each page, eliminating the necessary white space and breathing room between entries. The seemingly indiscriminate line breaks also muddle the meaning of some of the poems. For example, “I realized / today / it wasn’t you that I’ll / always be wanting / more / warmth” is difficult to decipher.
An evocative but cluttered collection by a passionate nature lover.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Yeates Expressions
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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