A breathtaking collection of poems inspired by timeless artwork.
An ecstatic collection of ekphrastic poems.
Marin writes from a place of visual art appreciation. Considering classic paintings, like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, alongside more obscure works, the poet explores human emotion, relationships, culture, and nature. Sometimes, the poet adopts the perspectives of the paintings’ subjects; in other pieces, she finds parallels between the artwork and her modern life. Marin uses Neena Sethia’s Contradictions of Being (2021) as a catalyst for a letter to her own son on his 12th birthday, advising, “Be the white dove with the plucked leaf / in your mouth, help others grow wings / on their heads to fly free.” Contemplating Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907/08), the speaker implores, “Lock me in your manly embrace, / then throw the key into the abyss below / my feet.” Reflecting on the Covid-19 pandemic, the poet relates to the desperate man in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893): “I’m vanishing, blending into my home walls, living a life of / non-living, each day a clone of the others.” The poet intuits that the crying woman in Lilly Martin Spencer’s Peeling Onions (1852) is in fact mourning the limitations of her gender role: “No days off, no / salary, no raise. She is not allowed mistakes.” Marin elegantly paints her own pictures with her sensory-rich descriptions, like the “pale blue of a cloudless sky // that kisses the sloppy ground of perfect green, red grass” or her humming fan’s “August soundtrack.” The poet experiments creatively with form: Marin uses blackout text to symbolize the erasure of history in a poem on the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, and a piece on Francesco Hayez’s Vengeance Is Sworn (1851) reads like a theatrical scene. Marin mines a wide variety of artwork styles and eras, represented in works ranging from Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1889) to Kadir Nelson’s Heat Wave (2019). Most of the poems include images of the corresponding artwork; it would have been helpful if every poem had been paired with the piece that inspired it.
A breathtaking collection of poems inspired by timeless artwork.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781962082242
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Shanti Arts LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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