by Molly McQuade ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999
paper 1-889330-26-4 A former contributing editor here at Kirkus and a poet in her own right, McQuade (An Unsentimental Education, not reviewed) adds to Poetry Month her unique blend of familiar essay and literary profile in this collection of light and jaunty pieces mostly about contemporary verse. Even the non-poetry pieces—about dancers, movies, Georgia O—Keefe, and prose writer Lorrie Moore—are filtered through the eyes of a poet seeking inspiration in their analogous techniques. A number of literary profiles (William Meredith, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic, Galway Kinnell) incorporate interviews, but without the dull Q&A format. McQuade is also an acute observer of the poetry world—in two essays, she surveys the business of poetry with a journalist’s savvy and elsewhere finds inspiration in the editorial careers of Margaret Anderson (The Little Review) and Harriet Monroe (Poetry). Talking around poems, and preferring analogy to explication, McQuade also indulges her sense of whimsy in essays about the ghost of E.B. White, her childhood pet goat, and her address book. The title piece captures her main aesthetic concern: her sense of the artist as observer. Chatty, casual, and often digressive, McQuade introduces a wild civility to the public discourse on poetry.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-889330-25-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
by David Sedaris ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 29, 2018
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
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In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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by David Sedaris ; illustrated by Ian Falconer
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by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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