A fresh repurposing of Shakespeare’s words, musical and beguiling.
Lines from William Shakespeare’s plays are plucked out and reassembled to make new verse in these sonorous poems.
Playwright Okuni ranges through Shakespeare’s oeuvre for lesser-known snippets of dialogue, which he reshapes into sonnet-like stanzas of 11 or 12 lines. The poems play very loosely on classic Shakespearean themes, prominent among them being the travails and traps of (especially royal) power. “My Crown” features lines from Henry VI, in which a furious Queen Margaret offers a paper crown to the pretender York before killing him, and concludes with Falstaff’s jibe, “and this cushion my crown,” mocking all such foolish headgear and pretense. “Brutish” cites Richard II and Coriolanus on the insincere cant, accretion of sycophants and henchmen, and lack of integrity that attach themselves to power. “Proclamation” invokes various Henrys to skewer the theatricality and empty promises of demagogues. (“All the realm shall be in common. All things shall be in common. There shall be no money.”) “This is and is not” reprises Shakespeare’s fascination with false fronts and illusions, while “How Like a Dream” explores his notion of life as a series of actors’ roles. Echoing Lear’s plaint—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?”—“This Abruption” ponders the confusion about identity and purpose that bedevils us. And the title poem—taken from a line accusing Coriolanus of shredding his oath as contemptuously as he would a ragged piece of cloth—warns of the indeterminacy and treachery of language and memory. (Okuni emphasizes this message by including versions of the poem in Arabic and Japanese, repeating the English version verbatim two pages later.)
The writing in these poems is excellent since so much of it is cribbed from Shakespeare’s rich, chewy dialogue, as in “Beware My Follower,” a lugubrious medley of lines, mainly from Macbeth and Lear—“Croak not, black angel, I have no food”—on death, hunger, wounds, and spookery. Okuni’s project is to arrange the lines to tease out—or at least obscurely hint at—patterns and cryptic meanings. But meaning is frequently a secondary concern to the sheer aural effect of Shakespeare’s verse; indeed, “Kerelybonto” consists entirely of the nonsense language—“Throca movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo”—that Shakespeare invented for All’s Well that Ends Well. Okuni’s arrangements emphasize the rhythm, repetition, and resonance in Shakespearean lines, blenderized down, in some cases, to commonplace phrases and words. The surprising result is poetry whose hypnotic incantations supersede its sense, giving it a high-modernist feel that brings to mind the work of Gertrude Stein, as in the contradictory cadences on the enigma of the self in “I Am Hers I Am His.” (“I am hers. I am his. I am hurt. I am I. / I am in this. I am in this earthly world. / I am in this forest. I am in tune. I am left out. / I am light and heavy. I am like you they say. I am lost. / I am mad. I am meek and gentle. I am merry….I am not mad. I am not merry. / I am not of many words. I am not old. I am not sick.”) The Bard would have been impressed.
A fresh repurposing of Shakespeare’s words, musical and beguiling.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781835841303
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Rowanvale Books Ltd
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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