An emotional and educational set of works that will successfully increase awareness of issues involving colonialism and...
A worthy debut collection of poems reflecting upon Yukon First Nations peoples’ relationships with the land and with those who mistreat the land and its residents.
Pealow, a self-described “settler” in the Yukon region, guides his work, which he calls “Reflections on the Decolonization of Self and Systems,” with a deep sense of respect for nature and human life. He tackles his themes in seven sections, starting with “States of Disconnect” and finally arriving at “Reciprocity,” which the author defines in the titular poem as “Feeding that which feeds you” with “Small acts of appreciation /… / To the spirits that flow through this land.” Some poems express the contrasting perspectives of large corporations and locals, as in “Receptivity,” which clearly gets across its message in few words: “We are adhering to high environmental standards. / You are talking about how to rape the land more gently.” Other poems entertain with humor while making their points; “The Moskitter,” for instance, is a sharply funny poem about a Texan who comes to the Yukon with big guns to hunt big game—and encounters very big mosquitoes. Still other works force readers to examine their own beliefs about land and nature; “All-Consuming (The Little Colonial Engine That Could),” for example, nods to a familiar children’s story as it asserts that “greed comes from need.” Key questions are scattered throughout Pealow’s work, all worthy of engagement: “By what authority is this your land? / Who can own the land? / How can you own that which owns you?” Several works clarify the theme of respecting nature: “Here, the land speaks. / The trees tell a story.” Overall, Pealow skillfully uses a variety of poetic devices and forms to effectively address systemic constructs—not only in Canada, but all over the world.
An emotional and educational set of works that will successfully increase awareness of issues involving colonialism and environmentalism.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-9305-5
Page Count: 143
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.
This historical fever dream of a novel follows the flight of a servant girl through the Colonial American wilderness, red in tooth and claw.
As in her last novel, Matrix (2021), Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine of language and rhythm. “She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time." Those onrushing sentences will follow the girl, “sixteen or seventeen or perhaps eighteen years of age,” through the wilderness surrounding the desperate colony, driven by famine and plague into barbarism, through the territory of “the powhatan and pamunkey” to what she hopes will be “the settlements of frenchmen, canada,” a place she once saw pointed out on a map. The focus is on the terrors of survival, the exigencies of starvation, the challenges of locomotion, the miseries of a body wounded, infected, and pushed beyond its limit. What plot there is centers on learning the reason for her flight and how it will end, but the book must be read primarily for its sentences and the light it shines on the place of humans in the order of the world. Whether she is eating baby birds and stealing the fluff from the mother’s nest to line her boots, having a little tea party with her meager trove of possessions, temporarily living inside a tree trunk that comes with a pantry full of grubs (spiders prove less tasty), or finally coming to rest in a way neither she nor we can foresee, immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization that readers may find deeply satisfying.
The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic, but some will wish for more plot.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593418390
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
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SEEN & HEARD
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