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 football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
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