A fine collection that brings secret travails to life with passionate intensity.
Feld’s luminous poems explore a range of topics, including grief, abuse, friendship, and Jewish faith.
The works in this autobiographical collection range across decades. Some deal with the poet’s childhood terror when her frequently unemployed father beat her elder brother with a belt; others deal with assaults she suffered in confused silence at the hands of a neighborhood grocer and an older boy in her apartment building. A series of plangent pieces recount the family’s vigil at her mother Lillian’s deathbed when the author was a newlywed, and harrowing works revisit a miscarriage and the agonizing birth of her daughter. There are brighter pieces on her marriage to her rabbi husband, Eddie, which re-create the “first time we made Shabbos together” and ordinary arguments over chores. Several poems recall her work as a peace activist and as a writing teacher helping rabbinical students express themselves. A few lyrical works elegize loved ones; others celebrate landscapes and communities, including the Illinois prairie and her current home in Northampton, Massachusetts, where neighbors rallied to help each other in a snowstorm. Feld’s collection features poems of gripping immediacy, but they add up to a reflective, holistic view of a woman’s life in which one sees beginnings shape a future and pain build compassion and strength. She writes in a free, conversational language that suits her confessional tone, but it’s full of realistic, evocative imagery, whether registering the unbearable fear of an abused child in “My brother and I each separately” (“I am not in the bedroom /…when my father / says, Pull down your pants, when / my brother pleads, No. Why? No. / What have I done? No. Please”) or a small, subtle kindness in “The straw, day one” (“Delicately, / knowingly, she dipped the straw into the cup, / closed her finger over the top to create a vacuum, / then slowly released a few drops at a time / with the straw to my mother’s lips, / to moisten them, to provide / relief”).
A fine collection that brings secret travails to life with passionate intensity.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9780881236262
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Central Conference of American Rabbis Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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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