A compellingly poetic call for awareness, empathy, and action around racism.
Historical injustice, personal trauma, cultural resilience, and more are covered in Millwood’s book of poems.
“Forcefully Taken,” the fiery opener, describes the harrowing experience of violation and “the weight of oppression, its jealousy and lust.” The speaker endures physical and emotional pain, likening the body to a “diamond under pressure.” “Guineamen” reflects on the brutal history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The poet juxtaposes joyful memories of freedom, when “Freewill crowned each step of life— / life was bright as the day once,” with the horrors of enslavement, when “Harvested like maize, / resisting bodies lay lifeless in heaps.” Body language, silence, and the power of words factor heavily into Millwood’s work. In “Kindness for Weakness?” the speaker makes an outward show of agreeability but resents the need to be nice, warning “Do not mistake my kindness for weakness, / nor my silence for acceptance / Within me, lurks the power to pull down your walls of lies / and I will repay the past with modern vengeance.” In a critique of performative allyship, in “Do Not” Millwood writes, “Do not pretend to understand, / when you are part of the problem / by being silent, by downplaying, / by casually dipping your feet in torrid waters.” “Hidden in Plain Sight” is a poetic manifesto that speaks to Black people’s contributions that are often deliberately obscured and praises their resilience: “I am the roots that run through your veins. / I am the ancestors you venerate. / I am the blueprint of your DNA. / I am the face you seek to hide.”
Millwood excels at conveying deep emotional experiences through vivid and evocative imagery. She describes “Great welts cascaded upon my temple, / Tattooing trees strong and ample, / With branches great and wide. Far-reaching” (in “To Never Forget”) and in “Rage” compares Black pain to a festering wound, “Oozing with yellow pus. / Injuries torn open / leaving rotting infection / down to the marrow / of the bone.” Her similes are equally strong, from clothes “discarded like empty wrappers” to how “your entrance is like a cool zephyr.” Millwood’s voice is direct and unapologetic, and she forces readers to confront their own perceptions and misconceptions around Blackness. While the book contains ample rage, it also shows encouragement and pride, as in “Black Gold,” when the poet asserts, “We are Jewels in human form, great beings to behold. / Calm as a summer’s day or as violent as a winter’s storm. / Walking the earth with majesty. / All who see them, bow in awestruck captivity.” Millwood also celebrates Black identities, proclaiming, “My Black is the type of black that brings forth life. / My Black breeds abundance in lack. / My Black is the type of black that calls men to stand as kings. / My Black rocks Earth and makes Heavens shake.” On the downside, the content can get quite gruesome and may be hard for some readers to stomach, like this recounting of a crime in “Little White Lies”: “One night, 2 Men, 1 Child, / Over days, beaten and tortured. / Smashing to a pulp / The child of a proud mother.”
A compellingly poetic call for awareness, empathy, and action around racism.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781399921206
Page Count: 76
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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