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 wide-ranging collection of testaments to what moves the heart.
Black Americans declare their love.
This anthology brings together dozens of love letters by prominent Black Americans. The entries, interspersed with illustrations, address an eclectic mix of topics arranged under five categories: Care, Awe, Loss, Ambivalence, and Transformation. In their introduction, editors Brown and Johnson note the book’s inspiration in the witnessing of violence directed at Black America. Reckonings with outrage and grief, they explain, remain an urgent task and a precondition of creating and sustaining loving bonds. The editors seek to create “a site for our people to come together on the deepest, strongest emotion we share” and thus open “the possibility for shared deliverance” and “carve out a space for healing, together.” This aim is powerfully realized in many of the letters, which offer often poignant portrayals of where redemptive love has and might yet be found. Among the most memorable are Joy Reid’s “A Love Letter to My Hair,” a sensitive articulation of a hard-won sense of self-love; Morgan Jerkins’ “Dear Egypt,” an exploration of a lifelong passion for an ancient world; and VJ Jenkins’ “Pops and Dad,” an affirmation that it “is beautiful to be Black, to be a man, and to be gay.” Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts’ “Home: A Reckoning” is particularly thoughtful and incisive in its examination of a profound attachment, “in the best and worst ways,” to Louisville, Kentucky. Most of the pieces pair personal recollections with incisive cultural commentary. The cumulative effect of these letters is to set forth a panorama of opportunities for maintaining the ties that matter most, especially in the face of a cultural milieu that continues to produce virulent forms of love’s opposite. Other contributors include Nadia Owusu, Jamila Woods, Ben Crump, Eric Michael Dyson, Kwame Dawes, Jenna Wortham, and Imani Perry.
A wide-ranging collection of testaments to what moves the heart.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781638931201
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Get Lifted Books/Zando
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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