An ambitious poetry collection that will defy readers’ preconceptions of what a sonnet can be.
Weber’s debut features one-a-day sonnets that explore the quotidian and the divine.
The San Diego–based author plays with the strict structure of the sonnet form in this hefty collection while also addressing diverse subjects. She manages to pack plenty of personal experiences into the 14-line rhyme scheme, telling tales of missing the bus, enduring food poisoning, and longing for air conditioning. With a careful balance of humor and seriousness, Weber drops in references to pop-culture touchstones, such as the ice bucket challenge, popularized in 2014, and Harry Potter; other poems address political events, placing them in the modern era despite their antiquated form. “Ferguson” expresses bystander despair in lines such as “There’s nothing I can do, this I admit, / And nothing to say, but I’m saying it.” In “Hopeless,” the poet copes with the 2016 presidential election results by seeking comfort in “puppy kisses.” Weber also turns her gaze toward the natural world; in “Calypte anna,” she offers an evocative description of a bird: “A hummingbird, afluff in coat of green, / Magenta scarf, and iridescent wig, / Demanded the location of his queen.” In “Blood Moon,” she paints a vivid picture of a pair of sky-gazers: “My seat’s a folded blanket on wet grass, / Our sprinkler-dampened dogs upon our laps.” The author cheekily plays with themes and titles, from a Gabriel García Márquez reference in “One Hundred Seconds of Solitude,” about her love of libraries, to “Mising Leter Sonet,” in which she removes one or more letters from the last word of every line. Throughout these poems, she also reveals herself to be a classically trained soprano and dog lover. Some experiments don’t succeed, however, such as “An Extremely Juvenile Sonnet,” in which Weber toys with genitalia-themed humor: “They say the penis [sic] mightier than the sword, / But sometimes writing makes one’s conscience prick—.” An excessive use of footnotes also errs toward overexplanation.
An ambitious poetry collection that will defy readers’ preconceptions of what a sonnet can be.Pub Date: April 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-96045-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Burrito Books
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Meaningful, edifying verse that tells of a beleaguered people.
Outraged, sorrowful and occasionally hopeful post-colonial free verse that gives voice to the oppressed.
In his unflinching debut, Hagher seeks to redeem the struggling African continent through the power of myth, song and poetry, but he finds it a rough go, even from the outset. Entertaining Homeric aspirations, he begins, “How can I write the epic / To celebrate your long forgotten history / And a new song of your heroes?” After cataloging his nation’s ills, though, he finds that both country and poetry are helplessly “[y]earning for lost unity.” “How then can I sing you a new song?” he asks. Hagher discovers challenges so deeply and systemically entrenched that neither action nor poetry seems to register amid the disastrous cacophony. With incredulity, he records the social pathologies that plague African countries, as in “Ballad of the Widow,” which personalizes cycles of self-defeating behavior by describing two men viciously and counterproductively fighting for the affections of a widow: “The quarrel was small / Their hate was big, bitter and strong / And now they sought to die / And double the widow’s plight.” Hagher both mocks and mourns the absurd fatalism of such cycles in the linguistic tautologies of “Dying in Africa’s Sudan” and the paradoxes of “Gbeji and Zaki-Biam.” Yet the problems are bigger than Africa. Economic and social inequalities afflict Mexican maids, too, who rank below even their hotel guests’ dogs: “Maids pray to Guadalupe for a miracle / To heal collapsed shoulder bags and heated muscles / Dogs see their doctors weekly for a fee.” Further, Africa is handicapped by the world’s gaze, symbolized by “wicked cameras” that “[s]ee nothing except flies sucking moisture / On mucus drenched nostrils of starving children.” Optimism is fleeting, and when it does appear, “hope flutters on the wing of a butterfly.” The epic of celebration and heroism is not fulfilled here, but the seeds of resurrection are sown in some of Hagher’s longer, more explicitly African pieces like “Ode to Gbaaiko Iyol” and “Predators of the Savannah,” in which the long arcs of African histories are revealed and celebrated. Ambitious yet aware of its own futility, Hagher’s project necessarily means poetry that is, by turns, bombastic, messy and opaque, but it can be remarkably powerful, too.
Meaningful, edifying verse that tells of a beleaguered people.Pub Date: June 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-1438946924
Page Count: 204
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Perceptive and honest, Newton manages to be profound without being abstruse. Though stylistically unremarkable, this is...
Short, free verse poems on the psychological and sociological complexities of life in London.
Wendell Berry once suggested, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” In this tightly focused collection, Newton (Tales out of School, 2009, etc.) seeks to demonstrate the difficulty of knowing either half of that conditional. With a nod to Dickens’ famous opening, Newton launches his tour of self and city with dichotomous uncertainty: “London is old and new, good/bad, / great and small…/ It is rich and poor, work/play, dull and / vivid.” Later, he suggests that “LA is the city of angels, Paris the city of light; / London is toy town, with puppet rulers/ raggedy / dolls/tin soldiers / upon painted sets…set in / motion by clockwork make-believe; it is magical / and comical, silly and daring.” Like Bukowski, whose influence is unmistakable, Newton is most interested in the social divides and tensions that define the city, with a clear sympathy for the ordinary, workaday resident. London is a place where the “Princess waved/smiled/gestured” at a narrator taking a walk and is the place “where cats and / such can look upon a queen,” but it’s also the place where narrators stumble across absurdly petulant and oblivious royal correspondence, where the social pressures weigh so heavily that those who fail are apt to fall “thru the modern world to a stone- / age period in full view of everyone” and where death is “shocking, raw and / untold.” Despite London’s many charms and majesties, Newton resists the allure of topographical verse. London is too perilous: “The taxis— / a heavy black mass running / across my paths, across all / the ways of my days. / Quiet and ugly, ugly and / dangerous; tearing past my / shins as I slip past.” It’s also confusing, as the traveler looking for Talbot Gardens finds when a local points him to Talbot Court, Talbot Road, Talbot Avenue and Talbot Crescent before admitting, “Sorry, can’t help anymore.” At least for those readers confused by all the specific references, Newton provides an arbitrary, but helpful, set of notes.
Perceptive and honest, Newton manages to be profound without being abstruse. Though stylistically unremarkable, this is clear-voiced and self-aware poetry that any city dweller will appreciate.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1907140044
Page Count: 88
Publisher: emp3books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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