A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential...
A carefully structured collection of abstract and conceptual poetry concerned with the nature of reality and relationships.
Raben’s first book-length offering may better be termed a project than a collection, and an ambitious one at that. Composed of 10 thematically distinct chapters, the volume offers a complex, nonlinear structure in which tightly entwined images, phrases and themes from each of the seemingly self-contained chapters shoot out tendrils that loop and coil themselves around the stalks of neighboring chapters. Insistently recursive and nonnarrative, the poems, taken together, read not unlike an untended villanelle gone to seed. There may not be a story, but there’s rhythm and a message. Amid it all, Raben’s voice is eminently postmodern; in addition to recursion and fragmentation, she employs highly irregular, subtle rhyme and meter, while working with short but richly syllable-dense lines. Her characters and perspectives shift frequently, exploring the same question from first-, second- and third-person, sometimes in a matter of a few lines. Time, her narrators understand, is relative—“for a moment we were the same / as we had always been / then the hours became shorter / and the second loses time”—but so too are constructed identities: “I allowed my eyes / to be painted on / chiseled and chipped / it’s harder to undo a life / made from stone.” In her most direct philosophical statements, Raben strikes a Whitmanesque chord: “We are the paint that / makes the painting / not the mind / and not the hand / we are the very stuff of life / together on the sand.” While sharing some philosophical ground with Whitman (though Raben ultimately evinces more pessimism), she evokes Alice Fulton in her abstractions and, at times, calls to mind Charles Simic’s surrealism. Occasionally, the abstractness crosses over into abstruseness, and despite the many elements of its larger structure, the collection feels incomplete. Still, Raben has a solidly crafted, enjoyable and appropriately challenging debut.
A bold, exhausting but highly rewarding experiment in stripping away the illusory world in search of only the most essential qualities of the human experience.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456851538
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Not quite Ripley, but an enjoyable tour of a deranged mind nonetheless.
In Hunt’s debut thriller, what begins as a humdrum play-by-play of a community’s recovery from a disastrous hurricane blooms into a twisted tale involving two murders—both by the same hand.
On a whirlwind trip to Machu Picchu, 40-year-old Judy meets dashing and single Sam Haite on a train. They flirt; they fall in love; they marry and languish in pursuit of connubial bliss. Sam makes millions selling miniscule pets to wealthy yuppies and Judy dabbles in doling out physical therapy to patients at the local hospital. But following a party at the Haites’, an elderly couple from down the street is injured by a fallen tree. Eileen—the wife—survives, but her husband, Joe, is left brain-dead in critical condition. When a hurricane hits, so does the ensuing drama. After weeks of housing Eileen and Joe’s meddling relatives (who are waiting for Joe to die), Judy takes matters into her own hands by secretly suffocating Joe in a brutal act she calls a mercy killing. At this point, the tone and pacing of Hunt’s novel shifts and picks up speed. In quick succession—and in stark contrast to the languid tempo of the book’s first half—Judy is fired from her job, walks in on Sam having sex with an old college friend and leaves Florida for her parents’ cabin in Maine. When Sam visits Judy unannounced and fatally chokes on a fish bone during a heated conversation about their crumbling marriage, Judy does nothing to save him. In a Tom Ripley–esque manner, Judy chucks all vestiges of her old life into the sea—along with Sam’s ashes—and begins anew, with nary a backward glance of regret. While she doesn’t succeed in matching the psychological complexity of Highsmith’s writing, Hunt’s portrayal of Judy bares merit, even though Sam’s death feels sudden and Judy’s reaction seems too blasé to be fully believable. Perhaps if more red flags were raised and more clever hints about Judy’s warped mental state were artfully interspersed in the text, then readers wouldn’t feel so jilted at the book’s conclusion. Still, Hunt’s Judy is a deliciously intriguing portrait of what a trapped mind is capable of—and how far it will go to break free.
Not quite Ripley, but an enjoyable tour of a deranged mind nonetheless.Pub Date: April 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466360044
Page Count: 306
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wood’s tale of greed and violence versus decency is best when revved up and rolling, not just spinning the tires.
A young engineer finds himself in hot water when the bigwigs at his workplace start cutting corners, ignoring his advice and playing dirty.
Daniel Robles is an upstanding, ethically sound engineer who quickly learns that his employers are more interested in the bottom line than the wellbeing of their employees. They often ignore his creditable advice when it comes to safety matters, especially at financially fragile Schirmerling Tire and Rubber Company. Wood capably draws some gratifyingly rude characters: O’Brien, head of security and overseer of a meth lab secreted away at the tire plant, and Hodges, who would rather save a dime than worry about a worker being steamed like a lobster by the company’s dangerously flimsy boilers. Wood also colorfully depicts Robles’ girlfriend, Carol, a deeply manipulative woman not afraid to pull the Lysistrata trick on him in order to get her way. But when Wood uses italicized letters to let readers into his characters’ heads, things get stilted. It’s difficult to imagine Robles thinking to himself, “He says there’s a position at Schirmerling Tire & Rubber in Akron, Ohio, a nice, respectable company. It’s time for a change, a time for something better. And Akron is near Kent, where Hector, my brother lives. Yes, it’s time.” The enjoyable complexity of this thriller—at one point, Robles is being framed in more ways than one—is handled with aplomb by Wood, though certain side plots fail to get the attention they deserve, such as O’Brien’s gambling issues and Hector’s delamination after the Kent State shootings (the story takes place in 1970). Nor does Wood conjure the ambiance of the time, which surely could have cast the evildoers in an even harsher light. The story’s precarious balance keeps readers involved, particularly with Robles’ gathering tribulations, the company’s vileness and a bracing denouement in the boiler room. The sex scenes, on the other hand, are flaccid: “Carol liked his long hair. And he liked to please her, for when he did, she pleased him in ways he really liked.” Like, please.
Wood’s tale of greed and violence versus decency is best when revved up and rolling, not just spinning the tires.Pub Date: March 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-387-09251-2
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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