A memorable and affecting collection of addictively mournful lyrics.
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
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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