by Sami Gjoka ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2011
Sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh and often insightful, Gjoka’s poems take readers on a journey, leading them to new...
Gjoka’s first book of poems in English offers readers a rare chance to see the small moments of life through another’s eyes.
This latest offering from Gjoka contains poems that cover such topics as birth, death, lovemaking and what it means to be human. While readers may not connect to every poem, most will find something that resonates with them. The author offers a supreme command of language, image and metaphor, and readers will find themselves lost in those poems that touch them deeply. He is versatile in his poetic structure, alternating between moments of breeziness and brutality without sacrificing the beauty of language or the intensity of his images. Though translated from the original Albanian (with the original text appearing on adjacent pages), Gjoka’s poems retain much of their lyrical and rhythmic qualities; “The old stems, / Old and dying / Have burst into new flowers, / Vanished stars that left space / Long ago” (“Love the Scents of Every Flower”). Readers of foreign literature will understand the changes that take place during translation, since poetry contains many idioms and difficult to convey allusions. However, most of these poems seem to retain their power in English, and allow readers to view the world through the lens of a different culture; “Some say there is a snake / We must slay / Filled with venom of religion / Of some other distant lands, / Of some poor, unhappy people / Scattered through some oil fields” (“Here So Close to the Capitol”). Readers may be turned off initially by the fact that these poems are translated, but a taste of what the author offers should help them over their hesitation and allow them to embrace these lines. Poetry buffs will likely find something to treasure in this collection and readers who find themselves drawn to its rhythms and images should welcome this work into their library.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes harsh and often insightful, Gjoka’s poems take readers on a journey, leading them to new insights and helping them see the world through a unique perspective.Pub Date: March 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456892999
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Sami Gjoka
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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