Versophobes and the poetically entrenched beware: Even you may be moved by these sweet imagined moments.
Fun, captivating poems little poems less about being lost than being found.
Korduba’s first collection of poems are spare but jolly vignettes, the products, no doubt, of many years of city living and keen observation of the natural world. In the foreword, Korduba sarcastically laments the current (and ongoing) decline of poetry, saying, “if only a verse could be appended to an exploding car chase, it might stand a chance of getting noticed,” but the pieces that follow are hopeful and light. “Cleaning Day,” for example: “In my cluttered apartment / chaos is king / and I’m sure his crown / is around here somewhere.” The warmth and humor of Korduba’s tone is charming, informing the tiny metaphors, composed mostly in free verse, that he uses to assemble his tender snapshots. Even when the topic is serious, as in “I Can’t Stay at Home” or “Despair”–“Sometimes a leaf / that has not yet turned brown / decides to fall off / anyway”–the compassion emanates from the poems. Among these little thrills of simplicity, however, are occasional hokey missteps, particularly in the pieces explicitly devoted to love, as in “The Lover’s Prayer”: “I will bend my arrows toward she that may / yet enjoy my company / and a chariot we’ll ride / in a bed not wide.” The majority of the collection, though, accompanied by thematic drawings, successfully delivers soft, empathetic candor.
Versophobes and the poetically entrenched beware: Even you may be moved by these sweet imagined moments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 0-595-33835-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heroine of Dave’s newest post-feminist chick-lit romance (The Divorce Party, 2008, etc.) must choose between the quiet life offered by her new husband and the fast lane her former lover represents.
Only days after 32-year-old Annie gets dumped by longtime live-in boyfriend Nick, an up-and-coming movie director, she meets Griffin at the chichi L.A. restaurant she frequents—talk about romantic fantasy: Annie’s career as a monthly travel columnist pays well, apparently demands little time or difficult travel and is never seriously endangered—and where he is temporarily the chef. It seems to be love at first sight, although Annie’s best friend Jordan, who also happens to be Nick’s sister, calls Griffin “Rebound Guy.” Three months after they meet, he proposes. They marry in a Vegas chapel on their way across the country to Griffin’s western Massachusetts hometown, where he is about to open his own restaurant—Annie’s job with a New York paper also allows her to live anywhere. But Williamsburg requires a lot of adjusting on Annie’s part. Griffin’s genius brother Jesse and his 5-year-old twins move in with the newlyweds because Jesse’s wife has thrown him out for impregnating the MIT professor guiding his doctorate program. The twin’s art teacher turns out to be Gia, until recently Griffin’s girlfriend of 13 years, whom Griffin’s mother makes clear she’d much prefer as a daughter-in-law. Then Nick shows up from his new base in London to win Annie back; she turns him down, but she feels stirrings. When the new Rupert Murdocklike owner of her paper offers her a job in London, Griffin encourages her to try it out. Soon she’s settled in London in a fantastic apartment, the company is grooming her for a new dream job, the publisher’s dashing son is wooing her and Nick is just a call away. What’s a girl to do? A lightweight romance posing as something realistic and psychologically profound.
Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02267-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
Lightman, a teacher of physics and writing at MIT, evokes the musings of Albert Einstein in this playful, unusual first work of fiction. It is six in the morning, and a sleepy young Einstein slumps at his desk in the patent office, dreaming of the nature of time. Time has been on Einstein's mind a lot lately, and he's become adept at envisioning each of many theories in concrete, three- dimensional form. While Einstein sleeps, Lightman takes the reader through the young genius's imagined worlds, evoking cities in which time is cyclical and citizens are doomed to repeat their triumphs and mistakes eternally; in which people routinely get caught in wandering tributaries of time and are washed back into the past; in which time is believed to flow more slowly at higher altitudes so that all humans, in order to live longer, build their houses on mountaintops; in which there is no connection between cause and effect and people live a carefree existence in each separate moment, and in which it is possible to stop time and live forever within a favorite instant. Occasionally, Einstein wakes up, goes home, dines with a friend, or stares blankly off into the distance, but the focus here is not on his personal life. Instead, with these brief, light vignettes, Lightman offers a glimpse into strange theoretical kingdoms—and also lets the reader in on the workings of a creative scientific mind. Cheerful fantasies, balanced exquisitely between poetry and the popular physics essay. (First serial to Granta and Harper's.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41646-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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