An enthralling collection, with themes both grand and intimate and verses that pack a wallop of feeling.
Royal romance, desolate churchyards, the destruction of a city, and traffic snarled by a snowstorm are among the subjects of these captivating poems.
Much of Huhn’s poetry explores spacious historical scenes through a close-up view of small details that highlight the symbiosis of beauty, brutality, and decay. In these stanzas, the Kassite kings of ancient Babylonia sponsor the crafting of gorgeous rings by importing goldsmiths enslaved in their wars of conquest; a Zuni Indian woman fashions necklaces of turquoise and animal figurines as offerings to the souls of the dead flowing by in the river; and a youthful love affair between the young King Louis XIV of France and Marie Mancini is symbolized by the exquisite pearl earrings he gives her and ends in her death vigil as he “lay abed inside / the perfumed chamber / of their reunion, the / upshot of the countless / flowers gathered to mask / the smell of a leg marbled / black with gangrene.” The author also has a fondness for elegies replete with spectral figures and somber meditations on mortality—he describes a tableau of an abandoned church collapsing in on itself like a lost faith, and a sepulchral vision of a woman dressed in a spider-silk white gown who “stands / on a sea of dead / marked by crooked stone / buoys bobbing in dust”; a memento mori that reminds readers besotted by love that “nothing flies / as fast as life.” And there are less dramatic but still vivid renderings of contemporary scenes: The mundane crisis of a snow day, including a tragic hit-and-run, unfolds in a staticky jangle of AM-radio news reports; a man arrives at the beach “hoping / to get wet // but Untreated / Raw Sewage Spill // No Swimming / said the sign.”
Huhn’s writing is dense, sometimes cryptic (endnotes illuminate some of his more obscure references), and impressionistic; the poems’ structures feel loose-jointed and improvised, but the language is concise and compressed, with a single word suggesting a world. His imagery is dazzlingly evocative, conveying cinematic visuals in the Vesuvian eruption described in “Cast in Herculaneum”: “Mountaintop blossom / blacks out heavens / a sun the gods captured / breaks through crust / pounding free / Luminous / springs burst skyward / Barely time / to scoop up / a handful of / jewels.” Huhn can step down from these mythopoetic heights into a quieter register that, in “Summer Fragment,” infuses the annoying grime of everyday life with a glow of numinous meaning: “Dearest don’t forget / and one last ask— / know anything good / to get gum off shoes? / A wad I picked up / on the boardwalk / won’t scrape off / It sticks like those / heavy summer days / when the thunderstorm / opens down so fast / we forget the sun / was just here.” This is open-hearted, emotionally resonant poetry, never more so than in this simple, exquisite rhyme in “Envoi”: “How lovers soon forget the day / When heaven shone upon the face / That built the little cottage dear / And wrapped with gold the dying year.”
An enthralling collection, with themes both grand and intimate and verses that pack a wallop of feeling.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781609644680
Page Count: 86
Publisher: BlazeVOX
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
