by Susan Browne ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2019
A memorable and affecting collection of addictively mournful lyrics.
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Browne (Zephyr, 2010, etc.) makes sense of an ending world in this new collection of poems, which won the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize.
Climate anxiety is a motif in the new book by Browne. In the first poem, “Augury,” she ruefully admits, “I can hardly believe we still have weather. / Today, this headline: / Places to Visit Before They Disappear. / Some billionaire will build a wall / around one of those doomed venues and sink / a dozen underground bunkers adorned / with gold and marble fixtures.” The despair over the changing world is in some ways an outward manifestation of the traumas in her own life, however: grief, strained relationships, failed loves. “We’d met in a bar in San Francisco—” she writes in a poem about a romantic encounter gone awry. “I was often in a bar in those days, / as if love lived there. // My father was an alcoholic / and my mother had just died, / and looking back at who I was then, // I realize I was crazy from grief.” The book is full of surreal imagery, humorous for the matter-of-fact manner in which Browne reports them but resonant nonetheless. In one poem, she walks past a man urinating on a Valentine’s Day window display. In another, she admits to shouting advice to a cocaine-addled character on the Netflix show Bloodlines. The tragicomic nature of loneliness is found in “Home,” a partial ode to an old basement apartment: “Occasionally, a sort of boyfriend sailed by / with wilted roses, the discount tag still glued // to the cellophane, in gratitude for the expensive / dinner I’d bought him because // he’d forgotten his wallet again, and because / I’d helped him realize he really did want to be // a monk.” Browne manages to communicate the rawness and vulnerability of life while never losing her surgical control of the language. The poems blow through the pages like passing storms, shocking the reader with their momentary intensity before disappearing on the wind. “Don’t worry,” she writes in a late and powerful poem, “the seizure of feeling / has passed, and I won’t mention autumn // or longing like the breeze lifting / the edges of the clouds and rolling them up // to disappear into infinity’s storage unit.” The reader reaches the end with a feeling of having survived a season of truly startling weather.
A memorable and affecting collection of addictively mournful lyrics.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-57380-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Catamaran
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Haley Pham ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2026
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
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by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 27, 2026
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.
A frustrated advice columnist takes matters into her own hands.
Before dropping out of MIT during the second semester of her sophomore year, Debbie Mullen had designs on becoming the next Bill Gates. Now, almost 30 years later, the stay-at-home wife and mother of two uses her considerable genius to keep the Mullens’ Hingham, Massachusetts, household functioning “like a well-oiled machine.” In her spare time, Debbie also gardens and shares “the fruits of [her] wisdom” with neighbors via the weekly advice column she writes for Hingham Household, a local “family-oriented” newspaper. Though Debbie is proud of her husband and teen daughters’ accomplishments, her own life sometimes feels a bit empty. As such, she’s both honored and excited when Home Gardening magazine selects her backyard to feature in their next issue. Then, at the last minute, the publication decides to go in a different direction and instead spotlights the roses of her arch rival. Later that day, the editor-in-chief of Hingham Household axes her column because she’d counseled a reader to get a divorce. That evening, Debbie learns that her hard-working husband’s miserly boss refused his promotion request, her brilliant older daughter’s sketchy boyfriend broke her heart, and her athletically gifted younger daughter’s chauvinistic coach cut her from the soccer team for being “chubby.” Enough is enough. Debbie has always given great advice—everybody says so. If certain individuals don’t know what’s best for themselves, maybe it’s her obligation to help them see the light. Increasingly unhinged entries from a “Dear Debbie” drafts folder pepper the briskly paced, meticulously crafted tale, which unfolds courtesy of a pinwheeling first-person narrative. Some of the plot’s myriad twists are more impressive than others, but plucky, puckish Debbie is a nontraditional antihero for the ages.
Gleefully sadistic, gloriously gratifying revenge fiction.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249624
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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