A luminous collection, full of arresting imagery that captures the warped richness of life.
Love, marriage, motherhood, divorce, old age, and the effects of poverty and oppression are among the themes explored in these ravishing poems.
Much of Gnup’s work is confessional verse that revisits milestones in a woman’s life in a voice redolent of passion and disabused wisdom. Topics include the long arc of romance (“At eighteen, I promise never to write love in a poem, / at twenty-six, I tell you I’ll stay with you always, / at forty-four, I pawn my wedding ring for ninety-five dollars”); the engrossing physicality of childbirth (“I know how to squat and push, / how to reach down and discover / the hard slick head of my infant”); and the wry indignities of online dating in one’s 60s (“do not focus on his hairy little hobbit hands or his jewelry”). Other poems explore social justice issues, including a remembrance of victims of the AIDS epidemic, a somber meditation on war, and a plangent elegy for a 17-year-old Iraqi Kurd girl stoned to death in an honor killing (“Afterwards / an uncle gathers her in his arms / like kindling”). Two poems recount Gnup’s experiences working in a welfare office, presenting a colorful, Hogarthian panorama of disadvantage and bad choices: “There are questions / you never ask: / Why do you stay with him, / when he throws you / downstairs? / Do you need another baby, / when you can’t support / the five (or seven or ten) / you already have? / And why all those tattoos / on your face?” Gnup’s poetry conveys intense feeling, dense atmospherics, and convincing characterizations in language that’s vivid and evocative, whether it’s a lyrical sketch of a French village (“Outside the cathedral / a mourning dove performs its hollow music of wind, / barleycorn, and sorrow. The rain comes again, tentative / as a girl’s voice”) or a stark view of a young waitress’s daily grind: “The busboy hoses down the rubber floor mats / under the fluorescent light, / the cook blasts Foreigner’s / Feels Like the First Time from the kitchen radio. / I clock out at 11:15 and drive home in my Plymouth Arrow. / I sit alone at the kitchen table, / (my hair smells like greasy fish, my feet ache). / I count my tips— / I smooth the short stacks of dirty wrinkled ones, / I build my little coin towers.”
A luminous collection, full of arresting imagery that captures the warped richness of life.Pub Date: March 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798988818649
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Grayson Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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