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
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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