An engaging collection full of outrage about senseless violence.
A set of poems about violence and war through the ages.
Anderson’s collection spans multiple eras, blending imagery from the Bible, the works of Dante Alighieri, and recent headlines. These poems are forthrightly about military conflict and the seemingly endless cycles of violence people inflict upon one another. After a prelude invoking the biblical figure of Cain, the writer links conflict and bloodshed to the history of the United States—from the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to more recent examples in which a “Primitive rage eating through a soul who worships idols / Forged by guns, rifles, handguns, assault weapons / Into a fear, smothering the intent found in the Bill of Rights” (“Charleston 2015: Sunday Morning, Winchester Cathedral”). Each entry unfolds like a movement of a gruesome symphony; indeed, at one point, the poet describes war as being akin to a musical performance: In “The Zagreb Ballet,” the bombing of the titular city is “an orchestra of mortars, a chorus of cannons, / and a conductor of bombardment.” There are several recurring images, creating connections and braiding the horrors of one people with others’; for example, the forced march of Palestinians to refugee camps are a “Trail of Tears so familiar / To their Cherokee brothers and sisters” (“Nakba: 2018”). Charon, the mythological ferryman of hell, “waits with heavy oar and rudder to ferry broken / Families from their homes across the Tennessee River” (“Charon at Brown’s Ferry”). Anderson passionately uses the sonnet and other poetic forms to create “a place where tyranny cannot reign / Because power can never murder Truth” (“Oath of the Horatti”). Often, these horrors are viewed through a wide lens, but the impact of Anderson’s poetry is most potent when it links the ravages of the battlefield with something banal, as when an American soldier operating a drone in Afghanistan observes that “We kill from America / With Hellfire missiles while my son safe in his room / With his X-box works the games I work at Langley” (“Predator Warrior Pose”).
An engaging collection full of outrage about senseless violence.Pub Date: June 24, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-81249-739-2
Page Count: 87
Publisher: Wick House Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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