paper 0-8229-5681-0 The dense and deliberately run-on poems in this challenging debut volume inspire the title with their slatelike angularity. Rawson adheres to the aesthetic implicit in her poem about Breughel: —Density, meanwhile, sucks the marginal subject/back into the thick . . . .— Both the poet and her sometimes confusing personae get lost in a thicket of clotted narrative, which seldom bears a clear time or place. It would be too convenient to ascribe her wild and fervid dreamscapes—full of dying flora, decaying animals, and rotting fruit—to the moment when the —acid kicks in,— but plenty of these poems seem etched in sober light. At best, rhythmic with an elemental sensuality, Rawson’s intense language recalls the hothouse prose of Cormac McCarthy: poem after poem, set in harsh landscapes, seek —the promised land— along various border areas’some apparently in the West, others in the Mideast.—The Border,— one of the clearest, set along the Dead Sea, recalls working in Israeli fields beneath mountains holding the threat of Arab suicide bombers. With an integrity of image, Rawson also imagines facing death by renting —a window in a foreign border town,— and, elsewhere, she plays an antique organ —during the stranded border of winter.—A number of poems recall the sententious litanies of Jorie Graham: Rawson lays on one odd statement after another, building to a beguiling accumulation of strange notions (—What we don—t know hurts whatever it likes—). There’s also a certain sonic consistency to these poems; but the meanings are tough to figure, and strictly for the initiated.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1998
ISBN: 0-8229-4081-7
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Univ. of Pittsburgh
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
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