Homeless people struggling to build a community ponder themselves and society in this photographic meditation, the second installment of Wilson’s (The Success of Failure, 2012, etc.) American Street Philosophers series.
Photographer and documentarian Wilson continues his study of Dignity Village, a homeless settlement built in a Portland, Oregon, parking lot. He’s apparently quite taken with the Village, which is indeed a hopeful project: it’s run by its homeless residents; survives on donated building materials, volunteer construction labor, sweat equity, and $35 monthly rent from each resident; and features winsome, 10-by-12-foot wooden houses decorated with bright murals and sprinkled with gardens. Wilson’s colorful photographs depict homey lawn chair confabs, atmospheric sunsets, and evocative portraits of the residents, their rugged faces split with sometimes-toothless smiles. He also relates the hard-earned wisdom of the Villagers, who expound on the importance of community and challenge social conventions that prioritize personal ambition and material possessions. Their ruminations, arranged in poetic stanzas, are sometimes unfocused. (“You don’t get a choice,” muses one woman, “you just get born. / We’re alive. We’re walking around. / We’re trying to figure stuff out. / We’re not really able to ‘get it.’ ”) The most articulate thoughts are usually those against the mainstream rat race, such as Dave S.’s condemnation of “corporate and social encouragement / to feel like a failure if not striving / for the big house, the big TV, the big car?” The philosophizing continues when some of the Villagers attend a lecture by the Dalai Lama, who tells the stadium crowd, “Don’t use all your potential for dollar, dollar, dollar.” The book bogs down when it detours to an extended community-building workshop, in which the Villagers gather in a Marriott conference room under the tutelage of well-meaning human resources theorists; the end product is a vision statement—“At Dignity Village we are committed to creating and maintaining a safe productive living environment, celebrating the diversity of our houseless culture”—that sounds like a parody of anodyne, corporate human resources-speak. Overall, it’s not the pensées that resonate here, but rather the visible efforts of people at the end of their rope to find their places in the world.
The ideas in this earnest but sometimes-muzzy work are hit-and-miss, but the visuals are vibrant.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A debut multigenre collection of short pieces presents vignettes focusing on the lives of African Americans from a variety of perspectives, both real and fanciful.
This eclectic anthology begins with an autobiographical sketch, “P Is for Pride and Perseverance,” in which King traces his early years from his 1979 birth to a 16-year-old mother to his incarceration for attempted robbery and his subsequent determination to do something positive with his life. “Baby Girl” reprises the story of King’s birth from his mother’s point of view, a girl whose teen pregnancy seems predestined by both her grandmother’s clairvoyant dreams and her own limited expectations. Other narratives are linked by shared characters, such as “Posse Up, Ladies First!” and “Thug Angel,” which provide somewhat idealized portraits of street gangs as building blocks of the black community. “Battle Kats” is an SF work about a group of humanoid felines from another planet who work undercover to defend Earth and its alien allies. The central section of the book is occupied by a collection of 21 poems. Some, like “Hold on to Love” and “Away From Home,” focus on romance while others, such as “The Rent Is Too Damn High!” and “Blockstars,” illuminate the experiences of working-class African Americans in inner-city neighborhoods. “Remember Me?” calls up the spirit of LaTasha Harlins, a young black woman shot by a Los Angeles shop owner in the early ’90s, speculating “I wonder what you could have been LaTasha?” King’s efforts to describe his personal struggles and the vibrant characters who populate impoverished black communities are ambitious and dynamic. His prose narratives are too short to feel really complete, but they deliver glimpses into a world mainly familiar to the urban poor, where drug dealing is one of the few available career choices, incarceration is a rite of passage, and street gangs view themselves as community leaders. While the author does have a tendency to romanticize life on the street, as in “Posse Up,” in which a girl gang maintains a strict “code of principles,” his writing presents a vision of what could happen if people worked to “play a part in the improvement of the community.”
A volume of poetry and prose that offers heroic visions of urban African Americans.Pub Date: March 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4568-8093-4
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Davis recounts the confounding pressures of his 1990s childhood in this debut memoir-in-verse.
When telling the story of your life, one might as well start at the very beginning. That’s exactly what the author does in this memoir, which he describes as “a thing like a very long lie to yourself.” Specifically, he tells of how “The White-Gloved Sheriff / kicked in the door / and / Pulled me” from his mother (whom he calls his “Supervisor”; he later calls her “the Computer Science Major,” “the Waitress,” and other occupational names). Unusually, he had horns and a lot of hair at birth, he says. He was immediately at odds with the people and other living things around him—his parents, his brothers, his family dog. As a toddler, he created an imaginary world for himself known as “FU,” which was “Filled with things that looked like me / And where things made sense / I was King.” His earliest years were characterized by horrible discoveries (school work, isolation, crushes, problems in his parents’ marriage), but his teen years proved to be an even greater series of highs and lows, involving confusion over geopolitical events, friends, computers, pornography, and marijuana. Like a novice who can’t quite figure out the rules of a game, Davis bumbles forward—all horns and fur and misunderstanding—inadvertently angering authority figures as he seeks an adequate method of self-expression. The poem is composed in short, direct lines, enjambed to emphasize particular words or phrases rather than establish a consistent overall rhythm. Davis’ idiolect is inventive in its names for things (siblings are “life partners,” pets are “prisoners,” teachers are “Part-Time Supervisors,” and so on), and his outsider’s observations of society are shrewd and often funny. However, the combination of snark and self-seriousness causes some poems to come off as petulant and cloying; as a result, it’s difficult to imagine anyone over the age of 22 finding the work emotionally affecting. Even so, the tone and style, coupled with debut artist Klimov’s truly engaging black-and-white illustrations should captivate readers of a certain anarchic mindset.
A nihilistic poetic remembrance that will appeal most to older teens and 20-somethings.Pub Date: May 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71806-449-2
Page Count: 143
Publisher: Nada Blank Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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