An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page.
A visual poetry book that grapples with the idea of the end of the Covid-19 quarantine.
“Of all that can never be returned, / the opening represents a kind of iterability,” reads the epigraph to poet Karasick and graphic designer Lehrer’s stylized poetry collection. It’s accompanied by a quote by the late Algerian-French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who’s frequently lauded for his deconstruction strategy of analyzing a topic, such as art or politics, through a distortion or subversion of established narratives. In many ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has thrust deconstruction upon the world, unraveling beliefs and allowing people to see the world with new eyes—whether they wish to or not. Karasick’s poems and Lehrer’s images of textual choreography deal with what emerging from a long, isolating quarantine feels like “in the today of wild touching; / the today of withholding, the today of / passionate rations.” This book has two halves; the former features seven numbered “Openings,” and the latter the longer “Touching in the Wake of The Virus.” The first feels largely cerebral (“just / open my head…this open house / of whispered screams”) while the second feels much more tactile, grounded in the yearnings of a distressed body: “how to touch without touching…where touching is already too much.” Karasick often uses alliteration and sonic association, using language to represent this slow re-entry—the kinetic chaos of relearning one another. Lehrer makes a performance out of form, drawing parentheses and blocky black corners around lines that talk of “borders” and “evasions”; blackening the many o’s of “openings” and their associates into portals; forcing the eye to sweep across unpredictable, textured pages when Karasick’s speakers lament their physical alienation. The words curl, grow, shrink, and wrap around loops and illustrations that still can’t fill the pages’ stark white space, evoking a feeling of impatience. At a few points, the repetitive form is less compelling, but overall, this collaboration keenly embodies a collective trauma that eludes a singular definition.
An arresting attempt to put collective pain and healing on the page.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lavender Ink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy (The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend—the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. Susan (a shrink with a lot of time on her hands) says to Tom, "Will you stay in New York and tell me all you know?" and he does, for nearly 600 mostly-bloated pages of flashbacks depicting The Family Wingo of swampy Colleton County: a beautiful mother, a brutal shrimper father (the Great Santini alive and kicking), and Tom and Savannah's much-admired older brother, Luke. There are enough traumas here to fall an average-sized mental ward, but the biggie centers around Luke, who uses the skills learned as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam to fight a guerrilla war against the installation of a nuclear power plant in Colleton and is killed by the authorities. It's his death that precipitates the nervous breakdown that costs Tom his job, and Savannah, almost, her life. There may be a barely-glimpsed smaller novel buried in all this succotash (Tom's marriage and life as a football coach), but it's sadly overwhelmed by the book's clumsy central narrative device (flashback ad infinitum) and Conroy's pretentious prose style: ""There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1986
ISBN: 0553381547
Page Count: 686
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
SEEN & HEARD
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.
The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.
Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.
Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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