An exquisite, evocative collection that delves into the beauty, mystery, and curiosities of life.
With profound insight, Merrow’s poetry explores people and places.
In this free-verse poetry, Merrow serves as an astute observer and documentarian of life. Be it a 100th birthday party, a grandmother’s Christmas visit, newlyweds moving to California, or unpacking Civil War–era china, she honors the poignant details of existence. “Graffiti Free” reminisces about an untethered period of life when the subject was free to do what she pleased. Merrow often explores the power of nature, such as the ability of an eclipse to awe people from all walks of life: “We yearn for the eclipse, / something new—a corona, / flares to rekindle hope, banana- / shaped visions, another decade.” Merrow experiments with form in “Camp Skit in Five Parts, Wherein a White Woman Plays Dead To See Where It Gets Her.” In “Craving,” she ponders what it would be like to live in another’s skin, ultimately deeming even that act of magic insufficient to understand someone else’s life. She concludes with a meditative poem that erases the division between humans and the natural world: “we are, / after all, made of the same stuff — / earth, water, sky, with nowhere to go.” Merrow makes music out of the ordinary with phrases like a “handsome nest” of hair, “the usual crawl of cars,” the “siren-flamed sunshine,” or a heron on “dripping stilts.” Something as simple as morning conversation turns undeniably sensual under Merrow’s gaze: “Mornings in bed talk is an ocean, / its swells and troughs the waters of life.” The poems are brief but powerful. There are no wasted words here, and each poem’s conclusion feels like watching an Olympic athlete execute a perfect dive. But Merrow occasionally cuts off too soon, abandoning the reader just as they immersed themselves in the scene she created. While the reader vividly sees the world through her eyes, the speaker herself remains somewhat shrouded.
An exquisite, evocative collection that delves into the beauty, mystery, and curiosities of life.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950462-71-1
Page Count: 78
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
