A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.
Robinson’s debut poetry collection seeks the wisdom of nature in things living and dead.
Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing to the amateur naturalist. The observant speaker in these poems sees herself in the chaos and precarity of the natural world. As she laments in the title poem, “I am as human as the mother / who birthed me, who left me / a story where I featherstitch wings / to a page without a field guide to identify / who I am or where I’m flying.” Birds—particularly dead birds—litter the pages of this volume. A gull explodes like a pinata after being hit by a truck. A yellow rail has its legs cut off by a mower. “Of course, the death of the bird isn’t the point,” says the poet of the latter. “The point has to be the bird’s life: what it saw, / and who saw it while flying so blessedly damaged” (“Because of Beatitude”). Birds aren’t the book’s only casualties; a dead opossum wriggles with maggots, animate even in death. A washed-up jellyfish brings joy to the poet, who tries to examine it without deflating it. The dead do not give up their ability to converse; indeed, the continued existence of their bodies seems to reveal as many truths about the natural world as creatures still living. The poem “Wing in the Freezer” describes a curio given to the speaker by a hunter friend: the wing of a blue-winged teal. “I’m vegan, / but he knew I had a freezer of berries / and dead birds. The birds are for science. / The berries are for me. I don’t feed the dead, / but last night I spoke with them.” In poem after poem, the speaker asks the reader to help her find meaning in what remains.
The author writes with a sharp eye and a musical ear—she is just as much at home in the narrative as she is in the lyrical. She considers the “Body of the Great Blue Heron,” that most majestic of American wading birds: “Heron’s got a body / of hollow bones. What lives inside that space? / Is that where the soul lives, in whatever cavity / it can find? Is that our soul when we’re alone that thuds / in our chest against the breastbone?”The short lyric “Self-portrait in Fragments” reads like the object labels for a personal museum case: “bluff of bone, / nest of hair, / breath from the buzz of bees — / forest of scars, / drainpipe throat, / manic mess of puberty —” Though most of the poems orient themselves in the animal world, it isn’t difficult to discern the human stories lurking between the lines of grief and trauma, aging and regret. In “Where the Goldfinch,” a teenage girl latches on to a bird’s song in order to transport her out of a distressing situation, learning “to match the rhythm, / to no longer long, to leave the body / and fly to the branches, sing so quietly / the song fades instead of crashes.”
A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780991378098
Page Count: 84
Publisher: Unbound Edition Press
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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