A monotone collection of high-minded poems.
Parihar praises the natural world and contemplates the self in this poetry collection.
There’s an art to assembling a poetry collection. Parihar addresses this topic in a poem entitled, appropriately, “A Poetry Collection,” musing how poems on different topics work together to form a whole: “Each poem a window to a different world, / Where emotions unfurl and truths are unfurled. / From the depths of despair to the heights of love, / The collection resonates, like a dove.” Parihar does indeed offer many windows on disparate subjects, from the grandeur of nature to the ghostlike anxieties that creep up on him at night and even the particular struggles of the American middle class. The poet’s chosen form overwhelms the content of the poems, however. All 71 entries are composed of four-line stanzas with mostly AABB rhyme schemes. The effect is demonstrated by this trio of sequential offerings that celebrate three American cities: “The Manhattan” begins, “In the heart of a city that never sleeps, / Where dreams take flight and secrets keep, / Stands Manhattan, a beacon of light, / A skyline of wonder, a mesmerizing sight.” Next, “Los Angeles” starts with “In the land where sunshine reigns supreme, / Amidst the palm trees and silver screen, / There lies a city of dreams untold, / Where stories unfold, and legends behold.” And finally, “Chicago”: “In the city by the lake, where the wind whispers tales, / Chicago stands proud, where ambition prevails. / A skyline of steel, rising tall and bold, / In the heart of the Midwest, a story unfolds.” The repetition of this structure flattens all that it touches, blending poems together so that all differentiation dissolves. It would be one thing if the lines rang out, but the rhymes often feel forced. To revisit the stanza about poetry collections: Emotions unfurl, but truths are unfurled? Why? Does a dove resonate? Parihar has clearly enjoyed composing these poems, but he’ll need to try a bit harder—and maybe even vary his form—if he expects others to enjoy them as much as he does.
A monotone collection of high-minded poems.Pub Date: March 25, 2024
ISBN: 9798320766812
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 5, 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
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.
The Nobel laureate’s singular aesthetics.
Award-winning novelist, essayist, and literary scholar Serpell offers a compelling elucidation of Toni Morrison’s notably challenging fiction, criticism, plays, and poetry. “There are passages in Morrison’s works,” she has found, “that no reader I’ve ever met understands on the first go.” The source of Morrison’s “famed difficulty,” as Serpell sees it, was not “her intersectional identity, her prickly personality, or her contrarian politics,” but rather her complicated and sophisticated understanding of Black aesthetics. Serpell’s subtle textual analysis of 11 novels, “Recitatif”—Morrison’s only published short story—and several essays, plays, and poems is enriched by her prodigious literary background and insights she has gleaned from archival sources: letters, diary entries, notes, and manuscripts. Morrison, she asserts, “refused for her work to be reduced to her race and her gender, or to be forced to fit the expectations foisted upon her as a result.” Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, seems to Serpell the first time in the writer’s career that she “directly addressed the white/black dichotomy” with characters who “are avatars for race.” Serpell gives extensive attention to “Recitatif,” a story in which “all racial codes” are vanished, yet one in which “racial identity is crucial” to its characters. The story emerges as “a kind of asymmetrical, contrapuntal, alternative dialogue” between its two female protagonists, “between an individual voice and the instruments of the social world, or between the reader’s experience and the story’s unresolved chords—or codes.” Celebrating Morrison’s “masterful difficulty and superb wit,” “her inscrutable yet perfect metaphors,” and “her unaccountable rushes of imagination,” Serpell affords ample evidence that she was “a writer whose deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification…and made for brilliance.”
An impressive, nuanced work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593732915
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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