Sublime botanical visuals elicit haunting meditations on the evanescence of beauty.
Images of nature inspire poetic effusions in Boscov’s collection of pics, accompanied by pensées written by various authors.
The photographer presents 52 of her images, each paired with a short literary vignette by a writer responding to Boscov’s picture. Her primary subject is flowers, rendered in vivid color in lush pond settings, where a blossom may emerge from or stretch out over water on its slender stalk, connected to its reflection by a single pristine droplet. She also works in black and white and artfully processed mixes (the mystical title photograph shows a bright pink-and-white blossom hovering in an inky void over a woman’s face conjured from gray mist). Other favored themes include brightly colored seascapes and grandly austere images of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert lifting their arms in harsh sunlight against a black sky. There’s a feeling of serenity and classical poise in her compositions, sometimes chilly but usually warmed by glowing colors; sometimes she unsettles her pictures by blurring the images at the edges or depicting sweeps of foliage overlain by scratches and sparkles to suggest anxious unrest. The writers respond to these beautifully open-ended images with impressionistic prose poems. Pietra Dunmore likens a snowy white hellebore to a woman putting on makeup (“The look is like music, jazz—a red lip, a winged line on the eye”). A neon-blue aquilegia blossom prompts Tama Janowitz’s whimsically surreal vision of flowers falling on a deranged city neighborhood (“Leaning out the windows, no one could stop themselves from grabbing handfuls, biting yellow tennis ball fluff. ‘What’s going on?’ occurred to everyone around the same time, suddenly munching more slowly”). An abstract picture of gnarled, black tree limbs enmeshed in shimmering scrub provokes Bonnie Jo Campbell’s bleak observation on the cycle of life (“kindness in youth can be simple, sweet; later, kindness is often the kindness of the sharp knife”). The result is a feast for the eyes and a set of beguiling ruminations on its rich variety.
Sublime botanical visuals elicit haunting meditations on the evanescence of beauty.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780999252901
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Matter Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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