A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.
Rhodes-Ryabchich confronts the joys and discouragements of adulthood in this collection of poems.
Poetry often has a documentary quality, reading like a recording of the author’s own experiences. As Rhodes-Ryabchich shows in this collection, poetry can also act as a heuristic tool, showing a speaker thinking her way through her place in the world. The book’s first section is arranged around the theme of single motherhood, and Rhodes-Ryabchich employs the sonnet form as a means of constructing an affirmational worldview. The first poem, “Sonnet for a Single Mother With Daughter,” begins, “I wake each day to joy—I am sexy. / Mother is me, full of love and selful. / I see a miniature me so lovely. / I have love to give—I am so grateful.” The mixed forms of the book’s second section ably explore the many different modes of love, from the breathless excitement captured in free verse to recursive, insistent longings embodied in villanelles. “Overture II” captures the emotional thrall of romance, with each line ending in the same sound: “The dawning Friday sun, Comes / In red, furious light, strummed / By magnificent God’s thumb, / Playing songs in the pink Plum / Cumulus clouds, like a hum / Over a warm, baby’s tum.” The third section, a love letter to the world’s many beauties, is an open-hearted series of odes: to paradise, to reeds, to loneliness, to the poet’s own face. The final section dissects the ravages of disease, be they bodily or societal. Poems touch on the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 pandemic, police brutality, drug use, and the pitfalls of the American health care system.
Over the course of the collection, the verses vary in terms of quality, and many of the poems have a line to two that don’t land well. In the sonnets, particularly, Rhodes-Ryabchich often leans into the unnatural demands of the form. The inaugural sonnet quoted above, for example, contains the awkward rhymes, “Sometimes I don’t want to be a growncub. / Always I don’t want this to be kill/joy. / I hope your joy can stay in the joyclub. / The red, faint clouds call out to the dreamboy.” The better poems tend to be in free verse, in which the poet seems to revel in the form’s relative lack of constraints, as in the poem “Futuristic Soliloquy”: “I imagine myself to be a healthy peacock / With bright feathers, brilliant / Like neurons, and musically synchronized / To the ping of galaxies, / Radiating in joy, and firing / With billions of star nebulae, / Oozing euphoria deep into space.” Themes of self-love and affirmation pervade the work (one of the sonnets, for instance, is “after Deepak Chopra”), even as the poet grapples with life’s darker and thornier issues. The lines aren’t always virtuosic, but they’re almost always engaging and playful, leaping forward to unexpected references or vibrant images.
A varied and often engaging, if uneven, set of works about such themes as motherhood, self-esteem, and entropy.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2022
ISBN: 9789390601288
Page Count: 81
Publisher: Cyberwit.net
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An informative read that will likely appeal to American history buffs.
A debut historical biography of a Colonial Massachusetts woman who plotted her husband’s murder.
Bathsheba Spooner lived in Brookfield during the Revolutionary War as the 20-something wife of Joshua Spooner, the mother of two young children, and the daughter of the highly vocal loyalist Timothy Ruggles. But she was dissatisfied with her lot in life, and when she met Ezra Ross, a 16-year-old member of a local militia, the two began a troubling sexual relationship. Soon, British Pvt. William Brooks and Sgt. James Buchanan, two former prisoners of war who stayed in the Spooner household, also become her lovers, and along with Ross, they would eventually execute a plan to murder her spouse. All four parties were later indicted, a trial ensued, and they faced execution, which forever cemented Bathsheba’s infamy. In his nonfiction work, Noone’s prose is erudite and accessible as he offers an in-depth look into Bathsheba’s background as well as those of the other players in this true-crime tale. He deftly offers extensive historical context as well, as when he writes of how the political conflict between loyalists and patriots raged in small towns (“In few towns, however, were the lines of demarcation so sharply drawn as in Worcester”) and presents painstaking detail about the home lives of women. Although the story is engaging on its own, it’s particularly intriguing when Noone examines Bathsheba’s mental health and how it might be perceived in the present day, noting that the question of her “mental competence has more recently become an issue” among historians. Although Noone focuses mainly on Worcester and the Spooners’ story, his thorough description of the events leading up to the American Revolution, as well as the war itself, provides a fine chronicle of New England’s cultural and political climate.
An informative read that will likely appeal to American history buffs.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0578835426
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An uneven but rich novel of a fisherman’s career.
A California fisherman evolves with the times in Koepf’s debut coming-of-age novel.
Alex Skarsen comes from a family of commercial fishermen in Half Moon Bay, California. His rite of passage comes in 1961, when the 11-year-old boy is allowed to skip school, put on his boots, and join his father and uncle for the opening day of crab season aboard their family boat, the Valkyrie.He’s not only initiated into the hard work of crab fishing but the business side, as well, in which union politics and crew rivalries can make for conflicts: “It’s a God danged free for all, is what it is,” complains Alex’s mother. “The whole season comes down to the first week and God forbid a breakdown. You work on the gear for a month, go fishin’ for cheap and hate your friends.” However, when a man on a rival boat falls overboard, Alex learns just what sort of stand-up guys his father and uncle are. As Alex matures into the fishing lifestyle, times get increasingly hard: The fishing industry is changing, the pickings are thinner, and crews must take increasing risks to make their pay. Along with his family’s crabbing work, Alex finds gigs diving for abalone, salvaging scrap, and fishing for salmon in the wild waters of Alaska. He encounters a wide range of characters who make their living on or near the sea, each with his or her own story—and not all stories are to be trusted.
The novel covers Alex’s three-decade career on the water and ends with some of his closest scrapes during his stretch in Harbor Patrol. Wherever he finds himself, though, the fish are never far from his mind; as he tells an old friend late in the novel, “Every time I dream, it’s a fishing dream.” Overall, Koepf’s prose reveals an eye for sharp detail, honed over his own decades on the waves: “The sky and clouds were displayed on the watery surface as blue and gray marbled mirror images. There was not a breath of wind all day, nor had there been for the two previous days.” The novel has a choppy, episodic structure for the most part, particularly in the second half, in which the coming-of-age story that revolves around Alex and his family’s boat is supplanted by odd jobs and solo adventures. Like a boat on the sea, though, Koepf doesn’t always have the wind at his back; some segments of the novel drift with little momentum, while others move along briskly and with purpose. Even so, the book is never tedious, due to its finely drawn characters, and readers will have the sense that they’re looking in on a way of life that’s mostly vanished over the last half century. In the tradition of exaggerated fishing stories, there are a few elements that strain believability to amp up the drama or humor. For the most part, though, the author provides a stirring, melancholic, and naturalistic portrait of a life on boats.
An uneven but rich novel of a fisherman’s career.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 369
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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