The ideas in this earnest but sometimes-muzzy work are hit-and-miss, but the visuals are vibrant.
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
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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