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 frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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