Dark, enigmatic, depressive verse that’s often compelling.
Lurid imagery, squalid settings and redemptive epiphanies run riot in these vivid poems.
Morbid themes run deep in this collection, as forthrightly declared in “Poe Describing Me”: “This numbing, slow-moving self-ignorance runs through my veins. / Like embalming fluid being injected while my blood gushes into a sink.” Many of the lugubrious poems are set in the detritus of some unspecified personal or planetary apocalypse: “Back to the Future” surveys ruins where “Splinters of glass pop through each and every bare toe,” “God-given Situation” takes in another desolate tableau featuring “Maalox bottles packaged with barf bags. / An ant colony hired as full-time maids,” and “Nearly the End” imagines an eclipse that “left the world forever dark.” And ordinary life? In “Time-Bomb Rocky,” it’s a meaningless cycle of ritual niceties and ennui, of “Try[ing] not to belch out loud in front of the old lady’s mannerly kids” while “The clock still spins in invisible circles like helicopter blades” and “The determined time bomb of life leaves nothing but waste.” Relationships with the female figures that flit through the poems are evanescent or vampiric: “Tight leopard-skinned skirt. / Black sexy pumps. / Bit of a flirt. / …She’ll suck the life out of you with her deadly fangs,” promises “Her Deadly Fangs.” Yet amid all the gothic visions are a few incongruously heartfelt, even conventionally spiritual poems. In “Childless,” the prospect of adoption—“There’s no special blood for a loving child”—eases the anguish of a couple “willed by God to be without,” while “Thanksgiving” offers a prayer for “Giving our strengths to those who fear.” Donovan’s verse features lacerating metaphors that veer among lyricism, grit and the cynically prosaic, as in “Cold River”: “The bridge with moss-filled initials like a funeral home’s sign-in log.” His poems are so private—even cryptic—that it’s sometimes hard to find a way into them, but the strong imagery and the emotions they convey will linger.
Dark, enigmatic, depressive verse that’s often compelling.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2006
ISBN: 978-1419646027
Page Count: 64
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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