A superb collection of great poems, paired with keen insights on what makes them tick.
Classic poems, lesser-known gems, and spirited commentary grace this sparkling anthology.
Yakich, a poet and English professor at Loyola University New Orleans, has gathered an eclectic roster of poems accompanied by his trenchant notes on the craft of writing and reading them. The collection includes works by Sappho, Shakespeare, and Keats; modern masterpieces like T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” and Wilfred Owens’ agonizing antiwar poem “Dulce et Decorum Est”; and larger selections from the editor’s favorites, Emily Dickinson and Fernando Pessoa. The anthology especially shines in its more contemporary poems, from Jane Kenyon’s limpid “Happiness” (“It comes to the woman sweeping the street / with a birch broom, to the child / whose mother has passed out from drink”) to Vijay Seshadri’s “Memoir” of life’s shame-faced moments (“Your poor eyes / to see me weeping in my room / or boring the tall blonde to death. / Once I accused the innocent. / Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty. / I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow”). Readers put off by baffling poems with cryptic allusions and murky intent will find a sensibility here that tends toward blessed clarity—many pieces are prose poems—in which vibrant images and metaphors express intelligible thoughts on recognizable subjects. Yakich’s accompanying essays range freely across the poetic enterprise, addressing topics from the niceties of rhythm and line to the ubiquity of roses in poems to the writer’s eternal struggle with procrastination. Some are straightforward exercises in appreciation and analysis: “Begin by noting the images—that is, the concrete nouns. Write them, one at a time, in the margin alongside the poem…Where do you find connections, similarities, oppositions?” If you write, read, love, or even struggle with poetry, this is the anthology for you.
A superb collection of great poems, paired with keen insights on what makes them tick.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9798765104095
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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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