Deeply thoughtful and satisfyingly unpretentious poems.
Loftus, who previously wrote Dress Whites (2018), repeatedly marries the heady with the mundane in this sophomore poetry collection.
There are a number of paradoxes attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno. Perhaps the most famous involves the supposed impossibility of motion: To get to any point, one must travel half of the way to it. To continue one’s journey, one must then go half the remaining distance, or one-quarter of the original trip. This pattern continues, but because there’s no line so small that it can’t be bisected, one will never reach one’s destination. Loftus’ poem “Zeno’s Paradox” takes this arcane thought experiment and gives it flesh and blood, reimagining it in terms of a man waiting for a lover who will never arrive: “He waits. For her. To enter, shut the door. /... / She’s still walking—to the broken steps, / sagging porch and flapping door, / the table, couch, his brazen, smelly hold— / as fast as he may summon her, / as slow as I implore, / she will take forever.” Thus does the author recast the philosophical as the poignant, simultaneously offering a new take on Zeno himself. He does something similar in “Camus sur le Pont,” whose title alludes to the French novelist’s 1956 book-length reflection on responsibility and abdication, The Fall: “A body strikes the water / so different after dark, / as if an exit / were an entrance, / below, above, at once, / parting a black mirror, / a looking glass of stars.” Camus’ book is about a suicide on the Seine, but Loftus adroitly (and devilishly) shifts readers’ focus away from the falling woman to the water, which swallows the body impassively. These unexpected shifts in perspective are Loftus’ stock in trade, and they infuse his deceptively straightforward poetry with depth and texture.
Deeply thoughtful and satisfyingly unpretentious poems.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73136-048-9
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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