A fierce, involving analysis of modern culture that sometimes wanders off topic.
Reyes wrestles with race, gender, popular culture, and relationships in this fiery poetry collection.
The book opens with “Red,” a meditation on Taylor Swift’s “fire-engine-Radio-Flyer- / Americana-taste-the-summer” hued lips, and the “currency” between them. In the titular poem, Reyes disavows Swift due to the controversial circumstances surrounding Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce, and his ex-girlfriend, Kayla Nicole, who is Black. Though Reyes once loved Swift because “heartbreak was my story / and she wrote it so well,” the Grammy-winning artist failing to stand up for Nicole during media backlash led to Reyes’ conclusion that the superstar only “cosplayed as a sympathetic character.” In “claiming to know the tense in which love happens,” the poet notes that love’s timeline isn’t linear but is evident in small details, behaviors, and feelings. “It doesn’t always last, / and we don’t all even know that it’s happened, / when it’s happening, / which is the cruelest of all time thefts,” she writes. Reyes draws inspiration from Pulitzer Prize–winning Diane Seuss in “My love for things is partial,” a poem about her father and generational pain. Multiple poems discuss her estrangement from her brother and only sibling because “His girlfriends progressively got lighter / He got bolder. / Then he Ye’d.” “I grew up” contrasts Black and white professional basketball players, including Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Reyes astutely notes that while Johnson smiled “on cue” for the cameras, Larry Bird “got to brood / with vain / moods.” The book concludes with QR codes for a playlist Reyes dubs the “Bloodletting soundtrack.”
Reyes cleverly combines memoir and cultural analysis in this subversive poetry collection. The book’s voice is its greatest strength. Reyes is at once introspective and uncompromising as she analyzes life for Black women in a world that often denies them full personhood. She not only calls out beloved icons, but she also interrogates her own fascination with celebrity. Rather than force a cathartic conclusion to her poems, she instead lets thoughts wander, leaves pages of white space, and invites readers to sit with her in the discomfort of powerlessness and rage. Her visceral descriptions will captivate readers, like when she compares the “silent synchronized / contraction, this tremble” of shivering bees to the “overproduced concert of crickets” and “melodrama / of cicadas who leave so much carcass in their wake.” Her descriptions of celebrities are equally creative and sometimes literary, like one of professional basketball player Angel Reese, who Reyes declares has “nearly perfect baby hair // ends curved with the precision of Artemis’ bow, / yet soft and doe-like as an Oread’s touch.” Imagining her father as a child, she paints a clear, touching portrait of him at Coney Island, “happy / eating pee-water franks and vandalizing gray fire hydrants to unleash // cold fury.” Many of Reyes’ poems, however, are unfocused; the titular poem pinballs among myriad topics, including U2 frontman Bono, the Israel-Palestine conflict, astrology, Taylor Swift’s love life, and social media. With so many detours, Reyes’ message occasionally gets lost. But the strength and original delivery of the ideas here make up for the meandering. A fierce, involving analysis of modern culture that sometimes wanders off topic.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781632431660
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Omnidawn
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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