A powerful and empathetic poetry collection.
Spooner offers a poetry collection about addiction and recovery.
The author, an addiction medicine specialist, offers a glimpse into the opioid crisis in Vancouver, British Columbia, via poems dedicated to her living and deceased patients. In “My Boy Is Gone,” the author juxtaposes the heartbreaking work of informing a mother that her 26-year-old son has overdosed with the quotidian concerns of her own 16-year-old son, who simply wants to know what’s for dinner. In “Darkness,” she describes how, in session, “I ask into the deeper layers / pieces of childhood darkness fall out onto the floor,” and learns that her patient witnessed his mother’s overdose; he later suffers the same fate. Another patient makes the case for weaning off opioid agonist therapy in “I Want Off the Stuff,” only to die from an overdose after he does so. Spooner catalogs the outlandish excuses a person with substance use disorder resorts to when contacted about a missed appointment in “Phone Call.” The author considers the many sources of dopamine hits, from drugs and gambling to sugar and sex, in “Distraction.” She concludes with “Mantra,” which includes a plea to “hear the testimony of suffering / don’t turn away / from the struggles.” Spooner acutely depicts the gut-wrenching nature of addiction treatment in this brief but effective book. Her compassion is genuine in lines like “I can’t tell you much about my life / but I will tell you / yours matters to me.” She also encourages agency in lines such as “Decide your one precious life / deserves to climb up / and out // into the light.” Some poems, like the stream-of-consciousness “Listen,” fall victim to 12-step cliches. (“Don’t try to navigate using someone else’s map this is how you get lost.”) The collection’s structure—four sections titled after Stoicism’s virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom—unnecessarily complicates a body of poems that pack a punch with their sparse, no-holds-barred intimacy.
A powerful and empathetic poetry collection.Pub Date: March 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781038316493
Page Count: 102
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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