The bleakness may be hard to take, but Sexton’s talent for social commentary and character sketching marks him as—in a title...
Relentless pessimism about the state of the nation infuses Sexton’s (Paper Moon, 2013) accomplished poetry and short fiction about down-and-out drifters and starving artists.
Though also a surrealist painter, Sexton proves adept at delineating character portraits through short fiction and verse. In this mixed-genre collection, most poems and short stories are only a page or two. The title piece, about hard life and untimely death in the ghetto, introduces the book’s dark atmosphere: “Being and begetting, struggling and / enduring…as gunfire crackles and sirens wail / and her fate is sealed with coffin nails.” Sexton’s characters—Nowhere Men as much as Everymen—are war veterans, hobos, sex workers, and blue-collar employees facing job losses and financial ruin. His settings are urban wastelands, often Chicago or Detroit. For instance, in “The Penworn Papers,” one of a handful of longer stories, an impoverished artist recalls his degenerate life as he moves between a freight-yard shack and a laundromat. Reversals of fortune go both ways: in “The Gift,” a Jewish satire redolent of Shalom Auslander, a young man reverts to emptiness in his old age, while “The Pawnshop” awards the child of Holocaust survivors millions of dollars to give away in scholarships. The palette is Edward Hopper’s, the ironic tone O. Henry’s. Black humor appears in nursery-rhyme refrains (in “Jack in a Box”) and sarcastic snarls, in “Valentine Rhyme”: “Another dandy day in the good / ole USA.” Indeed, Sexton questions American supremacy and the certainty that “in the USA, the bad guys lose, truth wills out, the righteous win.” In “Mount Money,” he undermines America’s self-identification with Switzerland’s rich neutrality by exposing an essential lack of social conscience: “I guess we’re a lot like the Swiss. / Except, of course, for the social programs / they have to take care of their citizens / from cradle to grave, which goes against / our grain.” “Our Town” playfully affirms Thornton Wilder’s morbid vision through gloomy imagery. The poems—rich with alliteration, internal rhymes, assonance, and puns—slightly outclass the stories here. They have broader application, universalizing human depravity and the daily fight for survival in an age of austerity.
The bleakness may be hard to take, but Sexton’s talent for social commentary and character sketching marks him as—in a title he gives a character in “Chop Suey”—“the Modigliani of the Mean Streets.”Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1500502485
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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