A rousing triptych of poetry as a weapon against apathy, ignorance, and inaction.
A poet and activist who founded the nonprofit organization Poetic People Power puts poetry performance on the page in this collection of shows.
For Bracco, poetry is how people come to understand the stakes of what’s happening in the world around them. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the organization she founded, she presents transcriptions of three of its collaborative spoken-word shows, grounded in three great threats to society: climate change, misogyny, and human rights abuses. In an introduction, she shares her own journey as an artist in 1990s New York City, during which her work “didn’t fit neatly into literary or slam poetry,” but she was determined to continue creating. The result was an organization that, like poetry, eludes easy definition. These three works combine poetics, research, history, activism, and theatrical elements; two were produced on Zoom due to pandemic-related precautions. Each includes a collective opening scene with commissioned poets each writing their own works (sometimes collaboratively) on the show’s themes. While not all the poems are compulsively rereadable without the energy of performance, Bracco and her collaborators largely present works whose urgency translates well to the page. Bracco’s scene from “While We Were Sleeping,” about human trafficking, is a good example: “And I re-learn a truth that I already know: / women are always vulnerable. / And the line between safety and danger is so thin / like the slice of the knife mark he left on her neck, / but the damage is longlasting / like the crush of broken bones that ache / for years after.” A poem by Karla Jackson-Brewer from the show “Can You Hear Me Now?” about her enslaved ancestors is similarly powerful: “She is compelled, / Driven by an urge / So primal and transgressive. / SHE WILL RISK / Slave patrols and whip / To find it.” Art and artists sound alarms on social issues that governments either don’t see or ignore, and this book shows how they might continue to make noise to help change the world.
A rousing triptych of poetry as a weapon against apathy, ignorance, and inaction.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781960329233
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Cornerstone Press
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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