A luminous poetry collection that may be too open-ended for some readers.
A contemplative poetry collection about human emotion and natural wonders.
Falk explores themes of transience, memory, and grief in this book of poems rooted in nature. In the opening entry, the speaker’s muse informs her that she is unnecessary because the sky is a “stunning event” whose ever-changing inspiration is more powerful than imagination. In “It,” the poet describes a fleeting but blissful moment of nothingness, “the mind gently sweeping thought away / until the window is blank” before life’s noise rushes in again. As “Morning” dawns, the speaker admires the sunrise, determined to love her life despite regrets. In “Geranium,” she contemplates the flower’s “hot eye, / which glares back at you like fire.” A “Summer Storm” batters a garden, and the speaker wonders why some blooms survived while the peonies succumbed to the downpour. A bird careening into a window serves as an “Awakening.” Memories of childhood difficulties creep into some of the poems: “The Walls of My House” recalls tension between a girl and her mother, juxtaposed with a neighbor in a coma whose daughter waits at her bedside for “a half-spoken word, / any blessing or curse.” “What Kept Me Standing” recounts a father hitting his 13-year-old daughter so hard she bleeds all over her hot-pink sneakers. “Enduring” reassures readers that sorrow “will retreat” and that time “wrestles down grief,” allowing one to “re-emerge, whole and cleansed.” The final poem, “Open Gate,” invites readers “to begin again.” Falk plumbs the depths of emotional and ecological truths with these sparse but insightful verses. The poet captures the holiness of nature, from “falling petal, wind-lifted leaf, / shift of shadow on grass” to the healing, grounding powers of a “lush, chaotic” garden. Her words paint stunning portraits as she describes “The laden arms of the oak, the elm, / and the agitated hunger of the small jays, // the fat globes of white sugarmum / where bees suck love.” However, the poems may be too abstract and removed for readers who prefer a more direct approach.
A luminous poetry collection that may be too open-ended for some readers.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781734531381
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Scarlet Tanager Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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