A tender but sometimes-uneven poetic retrospective of a woman’s life.
Hogan explores immigration, family, and aging in this rhyming poetry book.
The opening poem here, “Hand Me That Bootstrap,” sets the tone for this book in its unsparing look at off-kilter family dynamics. Hogan describes her parents’ decision to leave Italy for “that new place that shares the same rising sun.” The couple makes a “big mistake”—getting pregnant during a trying time—resulting in Hogan being born New Jersey. (The author is the first family member to be born in a hospital and bottle-fed—and the first to attain U.S. citizenship.) Throughout the collection, the author mostly recounts a joyful childhood filled with play, friends, and school. But there are some harder edges to be found here as well: “How Was I to Know?” explores themes of family and mortality, dealing with the guilt and grief of missing her father’s last day alive. “When Time Is a Monster: The Struggles from Within” contemplates how friendships fade while “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Sixty” laments the effects of aging: “From the arthritis in my knees / To the daily loss of my stinking keys.” Hogan isn’t afraid to show vulnerability in depicting the ups and downs of life in these poems, from youthful boy-craziness to poignant reflections on loss. Hogan conveys her enthusiasm and nostalgia for teaching in lines like, “We’d start our little lesson at the sound of the bell / The one I worked on for hours and hours (I’m sure you could tell!)” She’s also not shy about confronting the fact that not every day is a blessing: “Is there a way to skip this day? Go right to tomorrow, be on my way.” Other poems are less impactful, like “Ode to the Purple Porta Potty,” which, while playful and quirky, lacks the depth of the more emotionally resonant poems in the collection.
A tender but sometimes-uneven poetic retrospective of a woman’s life.Pub Date: March 22, 2024
ISBN: 9798890618030
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Newman Springs
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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