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
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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