A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.
An intimate collection of poems traces a painful journey from trauma to healing to love.
In the Q&A section at the end of this volume, Asherah reveals that the preceding cycle of poems was written in response to a sexual assault that triggered memories of childhood trauma. The resulting poetry eschews graphic depictions of harrowing events in favor of gentle exploration of the resulting sadness, grief, and mistrust that the speaker experienced. “What if you are only ever to be yourself in pieces?” is the question that launches her path toward recovery. This journey is divided into four sections, each composed of short, mostly untitled poems. “The Shattering” confronts “The broken pieces / Scraping at my open heart.” This section also addresses methods of survival: “And I can deal with individual losses, / I learned to never put all my weight on one leg.” “The Healing” similarly focuses on the symbiosis of damage and recovery: “Sometimes the heaviness is there / To keep you from floating a w a y.” One of the few titled works, “A Woman’s Bones Are of the Earth,” effectively grounds the entire collection in women’s lived experience: “If we did not learn how to tend to wounds / We would never have been able to survive.” The third section, “Light Shines Through,” is a fierce affirmation of life, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ve broken into my version of a masterpiece,” and describes other people as “an explosion of renewable fuel.” The last section, “Loving,” is a celebration of the heady and excruciating passions of a newfound romantic love. In showing how her speaker was profoundly moved by a relationship with another woman, Asherah is both an articulate romantic (“No one had ever held such curiosity / For the small ponderings in my head”) and a skillful dissector of feelings: “I don’t even know if it’s her I want, / Or just the feelings she brought out in me.” It’s the poet’s refusal to simplify the contradictory web of human existence that gives this book its power.
A compassionate and accessible poetry cycle about loving oneself in the aftermath of violation.Pub Date: March 14, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9851871-0-6
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Woven Ember Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.
A British psychoanalyst examines the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.”
Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up—or giving up on something—is based on beliefs about change. “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can’t,” he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism.” At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take “sadistic pleasure” in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most “serious” of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, “What is worth surviving for?” Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these “answers” to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial “answer” of his own by building on Freud’s ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss—being forced to reckon with it—is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.
A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614140
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.
An expert popular science account of human speech.
In his latest, New Yorker staff writer Colapinto provides an intensely researched, tightly focused, lucidly written story that is long but not too long. As the author points out, to call human speech a “miraculous feat” understates the case. All other animals “use their voices to make in-the-now proclamations about immediate survival and reproductive concerns, including expressions of fear, anger, hunger and mating urges.” Evolved perhaps 200,000 years ago, human language allows us to refer to events in the past or future and to make plans that we share with others, “to build the villages, towns, cities and nations that have given us primacy over the Planet and everything on it.” Even before birth, infants listen, their brains absorbing a dazzling array of tone, phonetics, syntax, patterns, and rules. Despite what early experts taught, language is not pre-installed in the brain at birth; babies learn it, usually accumulating a “mental dictionary” of 60,000 words by age 18. They achieve this because words are not random assemblages of digits. They carry meaning, and we are a species that craves meaning. Midway through the book, Colapinto moves from the mechanism of speech to its purpose. Darwin compared the changes languages undergo to natural selection, but the author disagrees. Over time, he maintains, changes in articulation, accent, and vocabulary have not increased but hobbled their efficiency, creating a Babel of incomprehensible tongues that pushes us apart. Observers claimed that the spread of media, from radio to the internet, would homogenize American speech, but the opposite occurred. Instant communication has combined with bitter ideological, economic, and cultural clashes to accelerate the creation of new American speech patterns. In the final chapter, Colapinto discusses political oratory, which has united Americans in the past. He gives high marks to the rhetoric of presidents such as Lincoln, Kennedy, and Reagan; however, like the majority of Americans, he considers Trump a divisive force.
A rich trove of science and contemporary culture.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982128-74-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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