Poetry that often transcends its own bounds, spilling over into readers’ lives and forcing them to confront their own...
Like a well-wrought memoir, this medley of free- and fixed-verse poems combines vivid personal narrative with probing self-reflection.
“So, I did the thing / I would never do,” confesses a young dancer upon landing an art-smothering, body-pulverizing contract job in “Paid to Dance,” one of many seemingly autobiographical poems in Augustine’s debut collection. One can easily imagine the same confession from the older narrator sleeping with her friend’s husband in “Wine and Cheese Villanelle” or the jaded lover of “Sestina,” who “learned to play double, just like him.” Compromise and disillusionment are frequent themes here but so are resilience and learning, although the narrators are often too busy navigating their lives to recognize their growing wisdom. Augustine often layers the perspectives of the narrator, author and reader to bolster the poems’ realism and emotional sincerity, and it’s a technique she hones to near perfection. On rare occasions, the poet usurps the narrator and lapses into bathos: “As we sit at this café table / in Montmartre, sheltered / from the downpour, I see our future. / I will write it down on torn paper, / using a sapphire pen,” seemingly taking seriously Billy Collins’ satirical advice in his poem “The Student” that poets should, “[w]hen at a loss for an ending, / have some brown hens standing in the rain.” On the whole, however, Augustine demonstrates much greater control and precision as she works through multiple iterations of love and loss, employing to great effect forms as varied as the prose poem, the concrete poem, the villanelle, the sestina, the sonnet and the ballad. She reimagines fairy tales, evokes foreign lands through bodily sensation, valorizes women’s perseverance, and revels in the rollicking pleasures of sex, even when they come with risk. As her narrators age, she tightens the circle, mourning and celebrating with equal intensity. One narrator contemplates the “Three Things That Did Not Happen”: “I almost saw Nessie,” “I almost won the jackpot,” and “I almost had a child. / She was there in my womb / until chromosomes killed her. / My God, that would have been something.” Among the losses, though, it “appears gone for good are dramas and bothers, / threats and therapists, drunk, needy lovers. / And…lovely, lovely, lovely is my cat’s furry belly.”
Poetry that often transcends its own bounds, spilling over into readers’ lives and forcing them to confront their own narratives.Pub Date: March 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482730999
Page Count: 104
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Like a 12-episode TV series condensed into a single book—categorically engaging, but occasionally overstuffed.
Terrorists planning a New Year’s Eve attack against the U.S. are working with people on American soil in Turney’s debut thriller.
In the post-9/11 world, federal agents pay meticulous attention to seemingly harmless behavior. But what appears to be a routine check on a monitored website in Arizona leads from an Arkansas redneck looking to mix a poisonous concoction for personal reasons to an Islamic extremist in Vegas who has already piqued the FBI’s curiosity. Mixed martial artist Taseen “Taz” Hamshan, with ties to the extremist, is recruited by agent Kyle Morel to go undercover and make nice with a suspected terrorist. But how are the terrorists staying ahead of the FBI? At first glance, readers might suspect that Turney’s 600-plus-page novel would hit lulls. Nope. He allows no off-the-cuff introduction to any character or subplot, providing rich back stories and, surprisingly, never dropping any of the minor plots. Even agents sent to handle mundane surveillance are established in detail—which makes it startling when anyone dies. It’s epic, almost excessively so, but the author does keep the numerous characters from overwhelming the book with subtle reintroductions, such as a soft reminder that Russian intelligence operative Kondrashov is watching the Iranian and Venezuelan presidents. Despite the multiple storylines, there’s cohesion. However, the novel might have benefited from giving stories and characters some breathing room. And the U.S. isn’t the squeaky-clean hero among indignant foreign countries—American citizens must contend with an unpopular president, while Russian agents, despite their country’s neutrality, debate warning the U.S. of a possible jihadist attack. The author laces the story together with striking transitions—evidence being blown up shifts to people watching pyrotechnics at the Treasure Island casino. As the New Year’s celebration approaches, Turney maintains intensity with a natural countdown and an abundance of people in peril. And don’t forget: One of the characters is a jihadist mole.
Like a 12-episode TV series condensed into a single book—categorically engaging, but occasionally overstuffed.Pub Date: May 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615645889
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Lionhorse Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.
Celestial gumshoes search for the source of evil in this knotty supernatural allegory.
Recently deceased ex–CIA agent Stewart Willoughby is an Observer, an almost-angel who uses rough tactics in the fight against demonic adversaries. He gets a break when he recruits a new informant, a senior executive at the Company—aka hell—who’s willing to give him information on “The Formula” that demons use to goad humans into sin. (The impish fiends are forever whispering malevolent hints into people’s ears, sometimes in person and sometimes over the phone from infernal call centers.) With his fetching partner and former fiancée, Layla, Stewart embarks on an extended investigation into the nature and causes of evil, from garden-variety manslaughters to horrific genocides. Their sleuthing takes them to some of history’s grisliest crime scenes—and eventually starts to eat away at their souls, as they resort to methods that are uncomfortably similar to the brutalities they want to eradicate. In this installment of his Logic of Demons series, Goodman continues fleshing out his inventive vision of the afterlife as an edgy, inglorious, down-to-earth place, where heaven itself is divided between hostile liberal and fundamentalist factions, and no one is sure that an always-absent God even exists. The devils, as usual, get the best lines; Goodman’s portrait of hell as a dreary corporate bureaucracy is a satiric gem—the chief torments are pointless routine, office gossip and nasty performance evaluations. The novel drags, though, when it focuses on Stewart and Layla’s relationship, which stays blissfully bland even after it takes a satanic turn. But Goodman also probes meaty philosophical themes with sophistication, as his characters wrestle with the problem of evil and the blurry line separating right from wrong. Subversively, he suggests that evil may not be a demonic plot but just another name for human nature. Goodman’s allegorical symbology isn’t too intricate—a farm boy Stewart encounters turns out to be the quite literal embodiment of Time and Chance—and at times the novel’s intellectual debates feel like an undergraduate seminar. Still, Goodman’s cross between a detective novel and The Screwtape Letters makes for a stimulating read.
A smart, entertaining take on eternal conundrums.Pub Date: May 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1432790790
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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