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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.
And now for some lessons in poetry and typesetting.
After Lessons in Chemistry (2022), a debut that became one of the most popular books of recent years, Garmus applies her unique comic sensibility to the story of Batter Gray, a man named after a family dog of mythic talents. A poetry maven who was reading Auden as a fourth grader, he was raised by a type-designer mother and historian father who dearly hoped he would choose some more viable profession than poetry. But via an amazing stroke of luck, he lands a job after college at Peck & Peck, an illustrious literary journal located in a beautiful building in New York City. He’s at the very bottom of the complex and dysfunctional totem pole, making copies in the basement, struggling not to run afoul of the cantankerous editor-in-chief, Salton Peck, or his smarmy assistant, Dexter York, both of whom have taken an instant dislike to our hero (and can never get his name right. Few people can). And to be honest, Batter is not without his flaws. The novel bogs down a bit in the middle, with Salton constantly excoriating his staff in ALL CAPS and much ado over the possibility that submissions have been taken outside the building, which is forbidden. Along the way, many, many famous poets are name-checked, as are many typefaces, since Batter has been raised to instantly identify a font in the wild. The best example of this occurs during his brief sojourn in jail: “The thing I kind of admired about Motherfucker II, besides his manners, was this huge tattoo he had on his neck that read I will fuck you up in ITC Bolt. Call me my mother’s son, but whoever inked it nailed the kerning.” The narrative picks up steam toward the end, as bad guys become good guys, mysteries are solved, and Batter throws one hell of a party.
Mostly charming, sometimes twee, with some really lovely things to say about poetry.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781668251065
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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