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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.
A chance meeting in a museum unlocks a long-closed door in a family’s past.
Of a piece with her last three novels—Commonwealth (2016), The Dutch House (2019), and Tom Lake (2023)—Patchett’s latest explores the evolution of families over time, romantic secrets, and step-relationships, again giving these topics the wry and tender treatment that is distinctively hers. As it begins, Daphne Fuller’s attentive husband, Jonathan, notices that a man has been following them through the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At first they chalk it up to the fact that “old guys love [Daphne],” as she told Jonathan decades ago, a notion he has held onto "like a souvenir postcard from another era." But it turns out that, though Daphne doesn’t recognize him, Eddie Triplett is her former stepfather. Like the author herself, as recalled in her 2020 essay “Three Fathers,” Daphne has had three dads. Her biological father, a deep-sea fisherman named Buddy Zabriskie, left the family early; her current stepfather, Lucas Ekker, lives with her mother in retirement in Massachusetts. Ekker is an unprepossessing sort Abby met working as the publicist for his self-help books, Positivity!, Positively Positive!, The Positivity Workbook!, Positive Every Day!, ad infinitum. The man in the museum, Eddie Triplett, was also someone her mother met through her job in publishing, and once Daphne realizes who he is, she remembers that “[their] hearts were forever stitched together.” This is because Daphne and Eddie were in a serious car accident when she was 9 years old, after which her mother immediately divorced him and evicted him from their lives. The details of that accident—among them lies the reason the novel is named after a horse called Whistler—are gradually wheedled out of Daphne by her younger sister, Leda, a clinical psychologist in New York and a reliable source of insight on the narrative’s key issues. “‘You make it sound like I’ve been keeping all this from you, but I’m not,’ [Daphne] said. ‘Who goes through life thinking about what happened when they were nine?’ ‘It’s all people think about,’ Leda said.”
An evocative and moving tribute to the death-defying, heart-opening, infinitely redemptive power of storytelling.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780063511637
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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