Powerful work from a bracingly original poet.
A poet delivers verse for a new world historical era.
Many scientists now say that people are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which the dominant force impacting the environment is human activity. Not so for pioneering feminist scholar Donna J. Haraway, who calls the current period the Chthulucene. For Haraway, the Chthulucene is characterized by a tighter connection between the human and the nonhuman, “inextricably linked in tentacular practices,” as she puts it in her book on the topic, Staying With the Trouble (2016). If this is all sounding pretty academic, it is. Which makes it all the more impressive that Caple is able to distill such dense scholarship into engaging, moving poetry. Readers get some sense of the ways humans and nonhumans are wrapped up together in her opening poem, “I Try Not To Think too Much,” an extended riff on the word “mind.” At the beginning, the piece feels like simple wordplay: “You are your mind / you know your mind / no two know the same mind.” But quickly, readers will realize that the author is on to something bigger: “Do flowers have minds?…speak to my dog’s mind! / things in the garbage have no mind / they do not mind…God is a kind of mind.” Here, “mind” becomes something more than human—and something that dwells in various and unexpected places. Elsewhere in the book, Caple matches words with images, creating pieces that are more collages than poems. One of these is “Wildness,” which features an uncredited photograph of the Canadian poet Pat Lowther pasted over a field of text with words cut out. The cutouts then appear on Lowther’s face, enigmatically forming the phrase “how how is memory a wildness.” The meaning here is elusive, but the effect is real. In this, Caple resembles modernist authors who came before her. Like them, she is able almost magically to build emotional momentum without narrative structure. The effect is mesmerizing.
Powerful work from a bracingly original poet.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-928088-79-0
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet memoir of profound change.
Journey to a new way of being.
Searching for relief from depression and his “manic, rushing-around life,” British writer and sheep farmer Rebanks spent four months on an island in Norway’s Vega Archipelago, a remote area he once had visited briefly. Shortly after that first trip, his father died, and so did others in his community whose counsel he often sought. Intensifying his sense of loss, his work as an environmental researcher took him to places where “the world was breaking.” “I began to feel unmoored,” he writes, “like a piece of timber drifting on the current….I was a poor husband, father, brother, and son. I began to lose faith in the certainties that had sustained me. I was growing less sure, and more confused.” In this serene, reflective memoir, Rebanks chronicles his stay on the archipelago, where he lived with Anna Masoy, an aging woman who made her living by collecting eiderdown, the fragile feathers that remain after ducks leave their nests. Sixty nests, he learned, could yield enough feathers to form one duvet. Rebanks worked with Anna and her friend to clear out around 300 old seaweed nests, air nest boxes, build new ones, and collect—and painstakingly clean—feathers. They lived in a house with no running water, an outdoor compost toilet, and a generator that Anna used only for bread baking. Much of the memoir recounts Anna’s stories about her family, the islands’ history, and her determination to forge an “extraordinary form of independence from other people, their values, and their noise.” At the edge of the coastal shelf, on an island 900 miles from Iceland, in a place dictated “by the coming and going of the tides,” Rebanks learned, above all, a new rhythm for the rest of his life.
A quiet memoir of profound change.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780063434172
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
For readers with an interest in Francocentric views of current events.
Editorials, occasional pieces, and interviews by and with the prickly French writer.
“The logical consequences of individualism are murder and unhappiness,” Houellebecq tells an interlocutor, going on to spin out a soliloquy that takes in quantum physics, the abandonment of psychoanalysis, the molecular basis of consciousness, and the ecological disasters we’re careening toward. The author’s sententious writings are of a piece, if often more personal: He doesn’t like going to parties, for instance, and though they can be made more tolerable with a “nice dose of hallucinogenic plants,” the question still stands, “What the hell am I doing with these jerks?” Houellebecq has been deemed a reactionary, but the political stance here is a sort of Cartesian socialism with a strong dash of religion—religion not necessarily for any reason other than that it “offers the feeling of being connected to the world,” and not just any old religion, especially not Islam. It’s to that faith that Houellebecq cheerfully admits a profound hostility, and one of his best-known literary works is his 2015 novel, Submission, which depicts a France under Islamist domination thanks to colluding politicians. The author defends the right to Islamophobia, which would seem less likely to get a person cancelled in France than in the U.S., but he’s not afraid of adding fuel to that particular fire. He’s also one of the few European intellectuals to openly praise Donald Trump, though for subtle reasons: “Unlike liberals (as fanatical as Communists, in their own way), President Trump does not see free global trade as the alpha and omega of human progress.” Moreover, he adds, Trump’s weakening of ties to NATO and his isolationism leave the world stage open for France to reassert its influence. Houellebecq closes with a suitably slippery view of the Covid-19 pandemic, featuring a dour summation: “We won’t wake up, after lockdown, in a new world; it will be the same world, but a bit worse.”
For readers with an interest in Francocentric views of current events.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5095-4995-5
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Polity
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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