An evocative poetry book about the powers of healing and connection.
A poetry collection that shows the devastating, exhausting effects of chronic pain and illness.
Ling offers a series of poems about a real-life woman who lived the latter part of her life in extreme physical pain. Alice grew up ballroom dancing and, as an adult, became one of the first female managers in the textile industry. When her body began to decline due to rheumatoid arthritis and Ménière’s syndrome, a disorder of the inner ear, her world became considerably smaller and more difficult to navigate. Ling presents the poems from his own perspective as one of Alice’s friends, caretakers and admirers. The verses provide empathetic accounts of Alice’s suffering and her courageous, admirable attempts to stay connected to the outside world, through church, family and the Internet. The stronger poems contemplate how pain can take over the body, the mind and the spirit. “PAIN!” for example, plays on the idea that even Alice’s hair hurts: “[H]air should not hurt / you cannot comb pain / brush it away like hair / on the shoulder its there / getting bolder making me / feel older stiff and colder.” “HOSTAGE” describes pain as terrorists who have “hijacked the body. / Sometimes there seem to be / more gunmen than passengers, / she is all pain and no body.” Other poems explore how Alice survives as her own advocate—with doctors, emergency medical technicians and people who can’t fully understand the impact of living with chronic pain. In one of the more poignant verses, the narrator feels guilty for being able to live an “ordinary life” when “any other life to her / would be so rich.” Ling deftly and beautifully expresses one of the most significant challenges of chronic illness when it comes to visitors, including friends and family: “They do not come. / They cannot bear / to live their lives, / to sit and listen, / ask how are you, / and hear the honest answer.” Although the narrator clearly admires and loves his subject and sees her pain, he also recognizes that healing works both ways. In the collection’s title poem, he states, “[S]he would find me out and turn me round, / lift me up and gently put me down, / she in need of healing, healing me.”
An evocative poetry book about the powers of healing and connection.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4520-8132-8
Page Count: 60
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body...
Wandzilak’s debut poetry collection spans a lifetime, musing on place, change, and mortality in light, occasional verse.
Built in the 1950s, the real-life East Deck Motel in Montauk, New York, was a mecca for beachgoers, surfers, and tourists of all stripes. But in 2015, its future was uncertain. In a sense, some of these poems, set at the motel, read as elegies—nostalgic celebrations of the seashore’s many moods. The title poem’s speaker reminisces about a night of love in the dunes, away from the crowd, and it’s gloomy with foreboding: “I could barely tell land from sea / I knew where I was, but not exactly.” With the lover’s “cold hand” in his, the speaker glimpses “the heart of a tear.” Other poems cast an eye over cultural high points, as in the longish poem “A Partial Autobiography.” The short, free-verse lines begin with oddity (“I was born with a remnant third nipple / I did not know what that meant for me”) but smooth out to more familiar touchstones: “I saw Yul Brynner play The King and I…. // I have seen the unicorns at the Cloisters //….I caught a wahoo in Turks and Caicos.” The oddity gathers and increases, however, in another cultural-event poem, this time on the occasion of seeing famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma in concert in 2013. The lilting cadence of “I ate elk with a runcible spoon!” proceeds to a playful but peculiar after-concert meal: “Later we fed Mr. Ma toasted farro / As he proceeded to eat my bone marrow!” Whimsy is one thing, but word-pairing for the sake of rhyme is another, as in this quatrain: “I have delivered fourteen lives / Each followed by fourteen placentas / Therein, I found elation upon this earth, / Unequaled to a dinner of lobster polenta.” The poet’s background as a surgeon also appears with a poetic nod to delivering bad news; in it, the narrator glances daily into a nearby cemetery, where a patient will soon be buried. A compilation of similarly medical-themed poems would be truly select.
An odd, nostalgic compilation, but a few poems about hospital patients see keenly into the condition of the individual body and soul.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-6727-5
Page Count: 54
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that...
A narrator rails against racism and ignorance in this debut poetry volume.
Celly’s book contains hundreds of poems, most of them quite short, that describe a man who is living in a universe full of unenlightened individuals who cause destruction because of their lack of knowledge. In particular, they do not appreciate the contributions of people of African descent and confound the narrator with their bigotry, murderous ways, and inability to become edified. Nevertheless, he is self-assured and encourages others to follow him. “I am the maestro without the orchestra,” he writes in the volume’s opening poem, “A Maestro,” but notes that humans won’t have the privilege of discerning what’s in his mind “until they stop killing each other.” As the many poems in the volume progress, he begins to refer to himself as “The Negus,” an African emperor or king. He has the “noble blood of the Kongo Kingdom” in “Legendary Blood,” descended from warriors, geniuses, and visionaries. The tone of the poems overall seeks to be high-minded, with references to The Prince by Machiavelli and the French Revolution. There is also a call to emulate African rhythms, such as the Congolese rumba or the songs of Bob Marley, in “It Must Rhyme and Flow.” A mysterious “they” is often mentioned, though it is unclear if this is a reference to Western society, racists, or uneducated people. Yet the narrator, who has a commanding presence, does describe an overall war on Africa and encourages Africans to rise up. Moreover, he transcends race and the color barrier and desires something mystical. “I am not a Negro. I am renegade. I am the Negus straight from heaven,” he writes in “Defined by Color Only Not So Fast!” Celly’s expansive volume, which aspires to thoughtful and strong lines about humanity and its failings, is not hostile but uses grandiose language to ponder and decree. While there are hundreds of poems, many are quite vague and are just one line or a short paragraph. The work is not entirely an exercise in self-aggrandizement, but the collection’s message can get lost amid the numerous ambiguities and repeated proclamations.
An ambitious collection—which asks the world to stop its destructive ways and recognize the importance of Africans—that remains hampered by nebulous and unspecified pronouncements.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68319-824-6
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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