A sweet and accessible but sometimes-lightweight collection of short poems.
Anselment presents intimately scaled poems about a woman’s everyday life.
This debut poetry collection highlights existential musings sparked by the minutiae of quotidian life, including gardening, medical appointments, rejection emails, the news, the weather, glimpsing a stranger’s tattoo, applying sunscreen, and the tasks of motherhood. The 75 poems range in length from just four lines to 2 1/2 pages and are grouped into nine loosely thematic sections. Part 1 contains just three melancholy poems (one a single sentence) about hearing an owl’s call in the early morning. Part 2 features poems dealing with sensitivity, anxiety, rejection, and traumatic medical experiences related to the author’s chronic heart condition. Several of these personify the heart as a separate individual: “I don’t know how to make her, my heart, stop worrying. / I don’t know how to grow thick skin.” Others describe the fear and dismay provoked by the Pulse nightclub mass shooting and the sighting of a man’s swastika tattoo in a grocery store parking lot in east Texas, where Anselment lives. Part 3 includes poems titled “Appointment,” “Doom Scrolling,” “Hovering and Apologizing,” and “Lunch,” which deals with the dilemma of whether the speaker should postpone a video meeting when a doctor’s running late. Part 4 is titled “Mind your spoons,” an expression common in the disability community that describes managing one’s energy expenditures and reserves. The weather turns cold in Parts 5 and 6, which include pieces such as “Mud Goop Rubber Boot,” “Yuck-Stuff,” “Trail of Splats,” and “Hard Freeze.” These poems share a motif of decay that fertilizes new growth. Parts 7, 8, and 9 expand the theme of messy regrowth, turning outward toward distant friends and seeing details as parts of a bigger picture. The final poem (which gives the book its title) asserts that, “In a world that rewards cruelty, / softness is bold, brave, and daring.”
Anselment’s writing is direct, relatable, and literally down-to-earth in poems such as “Butt in the Mud” and “Knees of My Jeans.” Most of the pieces in the collection are in free verse or prose without defined meter or rhyme, often using repetition, alliteration, and rhythm for poetic effect. The imagery evocatively conveys specific places and times that the poet uses to illuminate broader ideas (such as the cycles of history in “Failing” and the worries about raising a child in a violent world in “It Hasn’t Worked Out”), but the language is often ordinary (“Dampness from the soil soaks into the knees of my jeans, / but I don’t mind”). The insights offered are sound, but not particularly original (“As digitally connected / as we all are today, I feel like / our humanness isn’t as connected / as it once was”). A selection of color images of flowers and a bee taken from the author’s garden photos ornament the section headers, and a two-page preface expresses Anselment’s hope that her work might help others feel less alone.
A sweet and accessible but sometimes-lightweight collection of short poems.Pub Date: March 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798218629779
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Imprint
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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