A searching, emotionally candid collection that makes spiritual inheritance feel palpable and real.
Martin’s poetry collection maps the unsettled ground between estrangement and return.
The book is arranged in six very epic-sounding movements—“Longing,” “Ending,” “Fury,” “Ghosts,” “Reconciliation,” and “Countenance”—followed by an epilogue titled “Land.” The haiku that open each section work less as summaries than tuning notes, briefly resetting the register before the poetic voice enters a mournful register. Ifá and Yorùbá cosmology are not ornamental reference points here but are part of the collection’s essence: Ọ̀ṣun, Ikú, Ọyá, and the Egúngún appear alongside lovers, siblings, dying friends, inherited names, and California’s increasingly volatile weather. Martin’s advantage is her willingness to let the sacred remain bodily, domestic, and occasionally unruly. In “Crossing the Divide-N.A.,” the speaker sits “in the stillness of your dying” without forcing the moment toward revelation. “Owl of the Full Moon” brings illness, burial ritual, danger, and family strife into the same nocturnal field. “Letters to My Grandfathers” carries a different pressure, allowing migration, persecution, assimilation, and contemporary suspicion to gather until ancestry feels less like background than the main subject of focus. Martin’s voice moves easily among tenderness, fury, profanity, humor, and incantation, often changing tone within a single poem. That tonal instability suits a book concerned with what remains after love, health, certainty, or homeland has shifted beyond recognition. The writing opens most fully when Martin trusts scene and image to convey meaning. Grief becomes a mouse quietly worrying at the garbage; death sits beside the speaker at a window; a sister finds companionship in a Keanu Reeves film during chemotherapy; California gives and repossesses its beauty through ash, water, and fire. Some of the longer pieces explain their emotional stakes after the images have already made them clear, muting what was initially sharp. Yet the author’s candor is difficult to resist. These poems ask, among other things, whether anger can coexist with devotion and whether reconciliation means peace or merely a more honest way of carrying the wound.
A searching, emotionally candid collection that makes spiritual inheritance feel palpable and real.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9798896362203
Page Count: 104
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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