A vibrant collection of confessional, polemical verses.
Xavier fashions and refashions his idea of himself in this newest collection of poems.
The author is used to seeing himself from the outside. In this collection, Xavier places the reader within the many perspectives through which he has been viewed over the years, from that of his white-passing mother (“Then there was me / indigenous child / unwanted / brown-skinned / with freckles / … / everyone wondering where I came from / Adopted?”) (“Feo”) to those of the long-lost siblings he attempted to reconnect with in adulthood (“My siblings never responded to my message / likely after finding out I was a childless, married // homosexual”) (“50%”). Along the way, the poet considers how he must have appeared to his abusive stepfather; to the men who bought his services while he labored as a teenage sex worker; and even to himself, in the mirror, after learning in middle-age that his birth father was not Puerto Rican but Ecuadorian: “I see Ecuador and no longer Puerto Rico // I see indigenous spirits moving across the backs of Amerindian’s — / Inca’s and Taino’s splattered with the red blood / of sacrificed chickens…” (“American Redux”). Xavier’s cadence varies from poem to poem—some verses read like prose broken (or not broken) into lines, while others feature staccato clauses dense with feeling. The rhythm is always musical, and the best pieces are rich with arresting images and barbed confessions: “There were times I felt like garbage on the side of the / dance floor, watching men fall in love under disco lights” (“Vial”). Some lines, burdened with strained metaphors, fall flat: “Lights from a galaxy / could take billions of years to reach me/us/them / racism from a stranger’s milky way / only takes seconds” (“Alienated”). Even at their least effective, however, these poems, in their evocation of the queer subculture of 1970s and 1980s New York City, capture the richness of a vanished time and place through the eyes of a poet perennially in flux.
A vibrant collection of confessional, polemical verses.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9781608642748
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Queer Mojo
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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