edited by Margaret Stawowy & Jim Cokas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2022
An affecting and expertly arranged set of poetic works.
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An anthology of poems by professional and family caregivers of people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Editors Stawowy and Cokas have personal experience caring for loved ones with cognitive impairments. In a foreword, Stawowy expresses the editors' wish that they had access to related poetry to guide them through “difficult days of change and coping,” so they curated this poetry collection by fellow caregivers to help readers in similar situations. She notes that caregiving “forces us to give up the luxury of viewing death and decline as an abstract concept and…brings us face-to-face with its inevitability in a way that intellectualizing never can.” The poems here aim to reflect that process by taking readers through the various stages of Alzheimer’s disease and their subsequent effects on caregivers. It’s divided into seven sections, beginning with poems about the early days of the disease (“Evening Gray”) before moving into later stages involving nursing homes and, eventually, death (“Salvage” and “Salt”). These poems are harrowingly honest, and sometimes brutal, in how they illuminate the realities of caregivers’ lives. In Felicia Mitchell’s “My Cheating Heart,” the speaker says, “Sometimes, if she’s not all that very wet, / … / I check my mother out of her nursing home / without changing a thing.” The courage of these poets to discuss these difficult, painful topics is admirable, resulting in a touching reading experience. Additionally, the collection’s fluid structure succeeds in highlighting diverse aspects of caregiving, including small, seemingly mundane moments that later loom large in caregivers’ memories. Stawowy and Cokas have produced an anthology of poems that honors caregiving work with compassion, just as flowers “move us / beyond the moment / of failed memory / into the present” in Barbara Hill’s “Hyacinths.”
An affecting and expertly arranged set of poetic works.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956056-40-2
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Shanti Arts LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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IndieBound Bestseller
by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
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IndieBound Bestseller
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
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