A startling, affecting work about self-determination and close observation.
Palmer’s poetry collection explores queer identity, Big Pharma, and Northern California.
Inverness, California, is an unincorporated community in Marin County, a perfect hiking spot that Palmer frequents to meditate on the themes in this collection. Palmer’s narrators feel similarly unincorporated; they tackle social and historical events in the Bay Area, such as technology, the AIDS crisis, and LGBTQ+ life from a bird’s-eye view. The opener, “Telekinesis,” outlines what’s to come in the collection, including a near-drowning (rendered as “two heads full of memories…careening the paranormal Pacific”), relationships, and a bad breakup. Palmer writes about his past in pharmaceutical sales in the poems “Necrotic,” “Outside the Psychiatrist’s Office,” “The Art of the Tantrum,” and “Make Me Go Viral,” which grapple with the ethics of commodifying life-saving medications, the cavalier approach to wellness, and the paranoia within the queer community that AIDS could return to pandemic levels. The body is a central image for his ideas, and it appears as both viral host and lover. A frenetic quality builds throughout the work as Palmer reiterates his themes and skewers California’s pharmaceutical industry: “Ambition and antibiotics construct a secret circus / for psychotics.” The word virus appears over two dozen times, and Palmer favors the term “manikin” to convey his perceived lack of agency. The poems generally do not rhyme, and the stanzas are often broken, with lines that flow across the page like cells in the bloodstream. Some entries convey the subjects’ bleakness in the form of unyielding blocks of text. But Palmer’s knack for inventive imagery makes even the most despondent poems feel alive as he blends the landscapes of Northern California, Snapchat, anthropomorphic “furries,” and the rapper Future. These are queasy, graphic poems full of lines like “a chameleon the length of an erection” and “gravity is porous / and thinks / like a virus.” As a whole, it’s a memorable, visceral collection.
A startling, affecting work about self-determination and close observation.Pub Date: April 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781962131025
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Barrow Street Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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
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