A sometimes-sardonic account of a life’s journey in verse.
Poet Goodwin shares a collection of lessons and musings from a long life.
“You don’t have to be a poet / to write a poem,” writes the author in “Warning: Poetry,” “but if you do, / the danger is that you / will become one.” Indeed, this collection is largely marked by insights that come with nearly 80 years of life experiences. The poems are organized in sections whose titles have a pseudo-academic feel, including “Poetry Findings,” “Old Man’s Findings,” and a small collection of elegies to famous artists at the end, titled “Four Last Words.” The largest section, however, is simply “Random Findings”—an amalgamation of personal narratives, confessions, observations, and advice. Goodwin often turns his attention to darker aspects of the 20th century in which he grew up. In “My Service,” he deconstructs the experience of being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War: “You don’t understand / There was the draft / And I had flunked out of college…it took four years, / and I got no skills.” The past, both recent and distant, often feels like a specter as the poet touches on such events as the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of his mother, his aging body undergoing strange machinations, and, inevitably, advising future generations. Although Goodwin does experiment with rhyme and meter in “Poetry Findings,” his most engaging works are his most conversational ones, which effectively reveal the dryness of his humor: “I cried because / my favorite shoes fell apart, / and then I saw a man / who was dead. / Didn’t help,” he writes in “Attitude #2: What I Had and What I Saw.” Such moments convey far more than attempted imitations of the past. His poems about younger generations who “learned their sex from porn” (“It’s Not Like That”) can read as condescending and unimaginative, and not every short poem justifies its inclusion. What readers glean from these works will depend on their own generational standing—and, perhaps, how well they can take a joke.
A sometimes-sardonic account of a life’s journey in verse.Pub Date: July 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798327058385
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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