Absorbing poems that capture the majesty of nature and the complexity of women’s inner worlds.
A collection offers avian-themed poetry.
This volume combines bird imagery with narratives about girls and women. Kearney begins with two definitions of the word bird, which can mean the winged animal or, in British slang, a girl. A bird lover since childhood, the author delivers 51 poems, many inspired by 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names by Diana Wells. Kearney takes on the perspective of a newborn duckling in “Duckling, Swan”; reminisces about learning loon calls via cassette in “Loon”; and details the slaughter of penguins by sailors in “Penguins.” A poem about the 1940 fervor for Hollywood finches quickly turns into a cautionary tale for the speaker’s birth mother, then a young girl: “She didn’t yet know how a cage / can spring up around you, spirit you / away, and alone.” “Cardinal” describes a young woman’s flight from a convent while in “Heron,” a fearful girl escapes a dangerous man. Violence against women is the focus of a chilling poem titled “Bittern” while “Flicker” deals with infant abandonment. Kearney’s language is rich and evocative. She writes of an owl that “glides on wings silent / as a vole quivering / under snow” and a cormorant “luminous as an oil slick / in the sun.” Her poems are deceptively profound. The author uses the subject matter of birds as a conduit for plumbing emotional depths. A poem titled “Crow,” for example, does include tidbits about the bird, but it also reveals the speaker was given up for adoption and has newly connected with her biological sister: “Fact: crows can recognize human faces, / even remember them years later. / The first time I saw my mother in a photograph, / I thought it was some sort of trick / mirror. Hello, I said. I know you.”
Absorbing poems that capture the majesty of nature and the complexity of women’s inner worlds.Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-458544-0
Page Count: 102
Publisher: WordWorks
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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