A stirring collection of poems about love’s destructive powers.
Hanson documents the pains of love and abuse in this debut poetry collection.
The author may have been doomed from the start; as the first poem in her collection begins, “I grew up in the hallways of my father’s anger, / his mood a thermostat nobody could regulate.” Across these poems, the speaker wonders if her father’s temperament influenced her later attraction to abusive men. She describes a boyfriend flying into a rage when she put too much cilantro in a cheese dip: “His anger fueled the entire drive, and he was on a full // tank: hitting the dashboard, jerking the wheel to scare / me, jabbing his lit cigarette in my face, while I cradled / the offending crockpot warm against my stomach, // trying to cry as quietly as possible.” The poet examines the many forms love takes and the many different ways it can make a woman feel. From the shame of being a mistress who breaks up a friend’s marriage to the terror of leaving a man about to kill her to the expansive joy of being in a safe and loving relationship, Hanson deftly explores the overlapping and often contradictory emotions that can characterize a romantic endeavor. She excels at choosing moments of symbolic resonance, as evidenced in “As I Tend to My Succulents, I Hear My Father Say I’m Doing It Wrong.” The poems are at their best when she pushes into the murkiest corners of her own romantic psyche, as in “You Are Always Free To Run,” where she articulates with unsettling clarity why, rather than running away from her abusive partner, she ran toward him: “When I first saw the crack, when / I first heard him say the / words that kicked in the door, / I said, Listen, listen this is / your chance, love is so / ready, and I ran with arms stretched wide, / our hearts and our past broken fully open.” The book reads more like a memoir than a straightforward poetry collection, which only deepens its impact.
A stirring collection of poems about love’s destructive powers.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781959694182
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Inked Elephant
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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