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 deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.
The noted historian and New Yorker staffer looks into a future ruled by machines.
Thirty-odd years ago, writes Lepore, liberal democracies of old were being transformed into both authoritarian or autocratic regimes and by “automatocracy, rule by automation, government by machine-driven computation, prediction, and persuasion.” In this pointed rejoinder to Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which foresaw a world in which humans were essentially superfluous, Lepore charts a long history that extends deep into the “machine age,” beginning in the 17th century, which saw “the artificial as existing not only outside the natural but above it, an improvement upon it.” In this conception, humans were fallible, while machines faithfully and unfailingly obeyed the rules set for them. A logical progression followed in the 1920s with the rise of the Technocracy movement, a variety of fascism widely accepted in the U.S. that held that far from being free and equal, humans should be governed by scientists and engineers who alone “have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of twentieth-century life.” It’s a short hop from there to the present, with tech billionaires pushing AI and, in the case of the influential “self-described ‘neo-monarchist’” Curtis Yarvin, a dictatorship aided by it. In all this, Lepore writes, it is not just the human animal that suffers but all animals and all habitats, which can only worsen with the incessant demands for energy, rare earths, and water that AI requires. And what “humans crave, in that artificial world, is nature,” a nature that is increasingly silenced. This undemocratic world, benefiting only the wealthy at the expense of all else, is a prison of screens and keyboards from which, she writes memorably, “What is required is to imagine an escape, and then to conduct it.”
A deeply learned dive into the frightening visions of technocrats past and present.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781324098423
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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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