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TO LOVE IS TO LIVE

Name: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE
Author: Mashael Makhadmi
ISBN: 978-1450238656

by Mashael Makhadmi ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 22, 2010

An intense, tragic, but ultimately hopeful accounting of the price—and value—of passion.

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Obsessive love inspires a torrent of conflicted emotions in these heartfelt poems.

Love, Makhadmi writes in “I Love Love,” detonates “like the alpha phase of an atomic bomb,” and the 99 poems she gathers here register the searing heat, abject surrender and toxic fallout that ensue. The latter two predominate in her first section, “Poems of Painful Love,” addressed by a besotted woman—in “Raindrops” she wonders, “How can my life have meaning / When the sole purpose of my existence is to love you?”—to a nameless, and often heartless, man. “My stomach fills with pain you’ve left me in,” she keens to her cruelly absent lover in “Drown” before continuing: “I drown in tears that have fallen from my lashes; / Like a seal, I can’t keep up with killer whales.” In “Day and Night,” her unhinged anguish turns to self-victimization: “I cut my flesh to give relief to the constant agony in my heart.” In “Pain,” the tears and blood dry up under a hot anger: “To taste your pain excites me; / To hurt you is my mission. / Oh, how senseless I can be, / And send you to a mortician.” Makhadmi’s dark, repetitive, incantatory images of blood, tears and rainfall lift in the concluding section, “Poems of Sweet Love.” Here the woman’s devotion remains self-immolating—“I would sacrifice my happiness for you alone; / Like a wounded fox, I would lie on train tracks,” she vows in “Sacrifice”—but in “No Boundaries” it yields a quiet joy—“Like the beauty of a flamingo, / My love for you is never ending”—and in “To Know You”—“My heart pitter patters with excitement…Because to know you is to love you”—a sunny lyricism. Makhadmi’s unwavering focus on her narrator’s inner feelings often turns the figure of the lover into a cipher, yet it works: her poetry vividly conveys a certain rapturous kind of love that blocks out everything but the heart’s desire.

An intense, tragic, but ultimately hopeful accounting of the price—and value—of passion.

Pub Date: July 22, 2010

ISBN: 978-1450238656

Page Count: 148

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2010

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LAST ORDERS

by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996

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Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.