by Lee Upton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2023
A vivid, compelling collection by an erudite poet.
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A wide-ranging volume of poetry explores mythological figures, relationships, and the natural world.
Upton marries past with present, myth with reality, and ideas with emotions in this collection of poetry. Greek mythological characters feature heavily in the book. She depicts the murder of Hyacinth and takes on the voice of rape victim Danaë. Actaeon and Eurydice merit their own poems as well. Nature is another prominent theme. Upton considers noisy insects that “give the tree a voice” and wonders if it is fair to trick forsythia into believing it’s spring by placing it before a sunny window. Two sacks of mushrooms given a week apart inspire the poet to ask: “What other gifts are wasted on us?” The sight of a centipede in the shower prompts her to ponder: “How strange we must seem / to God. How sometimes we must / frighten him, how he must wish we would just / crawl away.” Intense religious moments, such as the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb being rolled away, and biblical figures, like Adam and Eve, are jumping-off points for other poems. As the book draws to a close, the author’s personal relationships become more prominent. In “The Blanket,” the poet considers her roles as a daughter and a mother and the ways they overlap. Upton is an austere but evocative writer. She details how the “milkweed blossoms / fade as if antique”; the way a willow “slouches as if it were in a classroom”; and the “pine’s greenness / frosted like a forged dollar bill.” The author is well read, as evidenced by references to everything from Shakespeare and Rilke to Shirley Jackson. Upton is also insightful; she wonders why “we give our hours away” to actors “as if our hours aren’t magnificent” and notes that “privacy is a kind of power.” Her honesty is unflinching, but she also injects humor into her work. In “Why Am I Not Invited to Your Party?” she recalls how she used to dance “like someone being stung / by ferocious bees.” The only time she goes too far is when she describes how “steam hisses off the oiled husks of him” and “flesh / slides to his ankles like a stocking” during the satyr Marsyas’ skinning. But even then, it’s hard to fault her for such skillful writing.
A vivid, compelling collection by an erudite poet.Pub Date: March 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781947817500
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Saturnalia Books
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
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Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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