An explicit collection of poems that lays a strong foundation for future works.
A deeply personal and eclectic collection of poetry that serves as a reflection on the author’s life and an artistic exploration of creativity, relationships, and faith.
Khaleel The Writer’s anthology begins with poems like “Josephine” that delve into past loves and their complexities, reflecting regret, longing, and closure. The poem “My Renaissance; My Revival,” for which the collection is named, recounts the author’s personal journey of rebirth and rediscovery following the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. The penultimate poem (“My Renaissance; My Revival – Reprise”)declares the author’s commitment to using poetry to create a new life for himself, one in which he’s healed from his past relationships and now uses his writing to defend the word of God. Khaleel The Writer successfully works in a variety of poetic formats. Some pieces, like the three “For Jesus”installments, incorporate prose, while others are all in verse; haikus, like “If God Saves Me…” and “Running Chihuahuas”can be found throughout. This adds variety and varies the pacing, making the work as a whole more easily digestible. While some poems feature lines that could be interpreted as objectifying women (“All I wanna do is relax, / see some bikini queens, and get a tan”), other poems complicate the issue (“Do you truly love me or just crave my dick in your clitoris?”), portraying the male speaker as the one subject to objectification. Readers may bristle at the author’s seeming solipsism regarding how universal a disruption the pandemic truly was—lines in the titular poem like, “You don’t know how it felt to have your world flipped upside down, and businesses you used to visit, shut down before your eyes. This pandemic fucked me up” suggest the speaker thinks they’re the only one to have experienced these major lifestyle changes during lockdown. Nonetheless, the author here demonstrates a unique voice that encompasses heartbreak, religious devotion, and an array of poetic styles and tools.
An explicit collection of poems that lays a strong foundation for future works.Pub Date: March 30, 2023
ISBN: 9798371347732
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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