Sublime botanical visuals elicit haunting meditations on the evanescence of beauty.
Images of nature inspire poetic effusions in Boscov’s collection of pics, accompanied by pensées written by various authors.
The photographer presents 52 of her images, each paired with a short literary vignette by a writer responding to Boscov’s picture. Her primary subject is flowers, rendered in vivid color in lush pond settings, where a blossom may emerge from or stretch out over water on its slender stalk, connected to its reflection by a single pristine droplet. She also works in black and white and artfully processed mixes (the mystical title photograph shows a bright pink-and-white blossom hovering in an inky void over a woman’s face conjured from gray mist). Other favored themes include brightly colored seascapes and grandly austere images of saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert lifting their arms in harsh sunlight against a black sky. There’s a feeling of serenity and classical poise in her compositions, sometimes chilly but usually warmed by glowing colors; sometimes she unsettles her pictures by blurring the images at the edges or depicting sweeps of foliage overlain by scratches and sparkles to suggest anxious unrest. The writers respond to these beautifully open-ended images with impressionistic prose poems. Pietra Dunmore likens a snowy white hellebore to a woman putting on makeup (“The look is like music, jazz—a red lip, a winged line on the eye”). A neon-blue aquilegia blossom prompts Tama Janowitz’s whimsically surreal vision of flowers falling on a deranged city neighborhood (“Leaning out the windows, no one could stop themselves from grabbing handfuls, biting yellow tennis ball fluff. ‘What’s going on?’ occurred to everyone around the same time, suddenly munching more slowly”). An abstract picture of gnarled, black tree limbs enmeshed in shimmering scrub provokes Bonnie Jo Campbell’s bleak observation on the cycle of life (“kindness in youth can be simple, sweet; later, kindness is often the kindness of the sharp knife”). The result is a feast for the eyes and a set of beguiling ruminations on its rich variety.
Sublime botanical visuals elicit haunting meditations on the evanescence of beauty.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780999252901
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Matter Press
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
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